Current Status and Issues about Nursing Practice Ability of Nursing Faculty in BSN Programs in Japan

Purpose: The number of the Japanese BSN programs exceeds 200 today, having increased by 20-fold over the last 20 years. This sudden increase resulted in the qualitative and quantitative deficiency of nursing faculties in universities. As a result, deterioration in the quality of nursing practice ability of nurses graduated from BSN programs is of particular concern and the improvement of their practical ability has become a social problem. It is effective to conduct a high quality nursing practice to improve the students’ nursing practice ability, and therefore the nursing practice ability of nursing faculties is being called into question. In addition, the result of our study clearly demonstrates that the instruction ability of nursing faculties is significantly subject to the nursing practice ability (KIGUCHI: 2013). Therefore, this study was conducted under the following purpose.
 The purpose of this study is to clarify the current status and issues about the nursing practice ability of nursing faculties who belong to Japanese nursing universities and instruction clinical nursing practicum.

Methods: A questionnaire survey by mail was conducted for 869 nursing teachers in Japan who belong to nursing university and in charge of clinical nursing practicum. “The Self Evaluation Scale of Oriented Problem Solving Behavior in Nursing Practice (OPSN)”, a 5-point Likert-type scale comprising of 25 items with 5 sub-scales, was used as a measuring instrument. SPSS Statistics 20 was used for the data analysis to calculate the descriptive statistics, which was compared with the result of a preceding nation-wide study conducted for nurses in Japan (Funashima ; Sadahiro, 2009).

Results: A total of 325 questionnaires were returned (response rate: 37.4%) and 312 of which were valid responses. The characteristics of the target nursing faculties showed that the mean age was 47.3 year old, the mean educational experience was 9.2 years (SD: 7.5), and the mean clinical experience was 10.0 years (SD: 6.9).
 Cronbach's coefficient alpha of OPSN for the entire scale was 0.781. In addition, the coefficient alpha for the sub-scale ranged from 0.685 to 0.697, which showed that the reliability was secured. As a result of factor analysis, 23 out of 25 items converged to the original sub-scale, which showed that OPSN almost secured the construct validity.
 OPSN score ranged from 25 points to 125 points, with the mean score being 110.2 points (SD: 13.7). This score exceeded the mean score, 95.9 points, of the preceding study that was conducted for nurses by 14.3 points. Furthermore, as a result of matching with the scoring section of the preceding study, 171 (54.8%), 131 (42.0%), and 10 teachers (3.2%) were identified in the high-, middle-, and low-scoring areas, respectively.
 These results show that the nursing practice ability of the nursing faculties belonging to the Japanese nursing universities is higher than the average practical ability of nurses. In addition, the score in each sub-scale were as follows: “IV. Providing emotional support for patients toward overcoming problems” was highest at 22.8 points on average (SD: 3.0), followed by “III. Making smooth interaction toward problem solving” with 22.6 points on average (SD: 2.9), “I. Search and discovery of problems by organizing and utilizing information” with 22.1 points on average (SD: 2.9), “II. Giving assistance to patients' activities in their daily life and medical doctors’ treatment, alleviating symptoms, and maintaining and promoting life function and their individualization toward solving and avoiding problems” with 21.7 points on average (SD: 3.1), and “V. Self-evaluation toward problem solving” with lowest at 20.9 points on average (SD: 3.9).
 All these scores of the sub scale were also higher than the result of the nation-wide study for nurses, which confirmed that the practical ability of nursing faculties were high in several aspects. The scores of nurses, on the other hand, were higher in II than in I, whereas those of nursing faculties were found to be higher in I than in II. This fact suggested that nursing faculties would tend to be higher in the assessment ability than in technical ability in the nursing practice. Furthermore, the scores of nurses was also low in V, suggesting a possibility that nursing professions in Japan including nursing faculties were generally poor in conducting self-assessment activity in an appropriate manner.
 From now on, improvement of nursing practice ability of nursing faculties can be expected by implementing the Faculty Development program with a concept to promote technical skills and self-assessment.

Conclusion: It was revealed that the nursing faculty of the Japanese BSN programs has high nursing practice ability. It would become possible to further enhance the practical ability in the future by continuing education for the assessment activity or technical skills. Moreover, a possibility was suggested that enhancing several aspects of teaching activities could provide high quality nursing practice instructions to students based on these high practical abilities.