Teaching in Nursing for the Professional Nurse Educator: An Academic-Practice Partnership

Does nursing continue to recruit the best bedside nurses to the role of educator and expect them to self-navigate the new role? Maybe. All registered nurses equipped to teach patients, but not all nurses are equipped to fulfil the role of nurse educator. Despite the proliferation of masters in nursing with a focus in nursing education program, not all nurses that become educators are prepared for the role. Both academia and practice experience this challenge. On the academic side, the nursing faculty shortage directly impacts nursing program capacity at a time when the current and projected dearth of registered nurses is daunting. Recruitment, orientation, and support of new faculty is essential to retaining them in the nurse faculty position. It is common to hire nurses into academia without academic preparation or experience in education. A literature review on the transition to the nurse educator role identified a number of barriers found commonly in academia including unrealistic expectations, role ambiguity, poor orientation, and inadequate knowledge of educator skills (Fritz, 2018). Both academia and practice have delineated practice standards for respective educator roles. In academia the National League for Nursing (NLN) has established eight Nurse Educator Core Competencies (Halstead, 2018); whereas the Association of Nursing Professional Development (ANP) has published the Core Curriculum for Nursing Professional Development (5th ed.) as a comprehensive resource outlining roles and responsibilities for these professionals. What support are academia and practice providing new nurse educators to assimilate to the role? The purpose of this presentation is to provide a synopsis of an academic practice partnership (APP) that is providing foundational education to nurse educators, as well as the established outcome metrics and results.

Academic practice partnerships (APPs) are not new to the nursing profession; nevertheless, due to the increasing complexity in health care and nursing education, there is an ever-increasing need to promote more partnerships, alliances, and collaboration between the community, health care services, and academia (Institute of Medicine, 2010). In a seminal white paper, the Tri-Council for Nursing acknowledges, “At this tipping point for the nursing profession, action is needed now to put in place strategies to build a stronger nursing workforce. Without a more educated nursing workforce, the nation’s health will be further at risk” (2010, p. 2). It is imperative for health care services and academia to work together for the health of the nation. Based on the call to partner, a private faith based health care system that encompasses a bachelor’s in nursing program established a formal academic practice partnership. The literature on academic practice partnerships is sparse. Perkins (2014) found that based on the Partnership Functioning Model (ADD citation here) partnership synergy has a positive correlation to partnership sustainability. Synergy is related to the efficiency, leadership, administration and management, and nonfinancial resources of the partners. These concepts align with the guidelines provided in the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Partnership toolkit (https://www.aacnnursing.org/Academic-Practice-Partnerships/Implementation-Tool-Kit) and IOM Future of Nursing Recommendations (2010).

Utilizing the evidence delineated above, the described APP created a formal infrastructure to include an overall goal, program outcomes, outcomes metrics, content outline, and an evaluation plan. This infrastructure includes formally designating the project leader, roles and responsibilities of leaders, and commitment to attending planning meetings and gathering academia and practice leadership support. This infrastructure supported the design of a “Teaching in Nursing for the Professional Nurse Educator program” based on a needs assessment of new nurse educators in the role of Nursing Professional Development (NPD) specialists and new nursing faculty. Needs assessments nursing faculty and administrators have suggested faculty and educator development to focus specially on core teaching skill development (Bigbee, Rainwater, & Butani, 2016). The needs assessment within the practice settings indicated similar findings to published studies with experienced nurses finding themselves in new roles where curriculum development, evaluation, and teaching being a major focus of the role with minimal formal education on how to fulfill this role (Burke, Richardson, & Smith, 2017). Through the existing academic-practice partnership, a proposal was created to offer a series of workshops tailored to the common needs of nursing faculty and nursing professional development specialists who were new to the role. A leadership team was formed consisting of senior nursing faculty and the chair of the academic practice partnership group to create the curriculum and pilot the series of workshops. The first participants consisted of faculty in leadership roles, the College’s instructional designer, and the Nursing Professional Development Coordinators representing different facilities within the health system. One of the first outcomes was to create a crosswalk table between the National League for Nursing’s (NLN) nurse educator competencies (2012) and the Nursing Professional Development’s (2016) standards of practice. The outcomes of the education sessions were mutually agreed upon by both academic and practice partners and each entity determined metrics to evaluate both short and long-term effectiveness of the program. As time and space are continual challenges in providing programming for staff and faculty development a hybrid approach was selected as it has been found to be preferred to either fully online or face to face (Bigbee et al., 2016; Joseph, Oh, & Ackerman, 2018). The design included one hour of theoretical foundation on the topic followed by a two-hour face to face session with the academic faculty facilitating each session. The four sessions included: Curriculum in Nursing, Evaluation in Nursing, Education Technology, and Teaching in Nursing. The program was fully piloted over the course of four months with a one-hour debriefing with participants and facilitators to ensure the needs of both academic faculty and NPD specialists would be met. At the conclusion of the first pilot program, the results included suggested improvements within some of the modules, as well as extended the length of the face to face sessions to offer the opportunity for more dialogue and relationship building among faculty and NPD specialists who share the same experience of being new to role. Lessons learned will be shared in the presentation as some experiences thought to be unique in the academic setting translated to the practice setting and vice versa. The forethought into the design of the program has provided a platform for replication and will be repeated each academic year with participants selected by respective leaders from the academic practice partnership team.