To Address the Nursing Faculty Shortage, Start with the Pay Gap

The salary gap between clinical and faculty roles.

Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

There is a national shortage of nursing faculty to educate the future nurse workforce. The biggest barrier to recruiting and retaining nursing faculty is the salary gap between the faculty and clinical nursing roles. Nurses routinely take pay cuts of as much as $40,000 when leaving clinical practice to teach full-time. The faculty role is vital to the health of the profession, and it is particularly important to recruit excellent educators with relevant clinical experience.

The salary gap raises a clear question: why would one choose to leave clinical practice and take a pay cut? Unfortunately, many nursing advocacy organizations have been silent on this issue, a silence that has contributed to the worsening of the nurse faculty workforce shortage. In 2023, there were 1,977 full-time faculty vacancies that were unfilled, or 7.8% of the faculty workforce. Faculty shortages are projected to worsen over the next decade as an aging faculty workforce approaches retirement.

2024-07-23T11:30:48-04:00June 14th, 2024|Nursing, Nursing education|3 Comments

The ‘World’s Meanest’ Clinical Nursing Instructor

When I was growing up, my mother kept a short essay called “I Had the World’s Meanest Mother” displayed in our house. She really loved that essay. What I’m writing today is inspired by that essay. It’s not for mothers but for all those clinical instructors who continue to cultivate the next generation of nurses.

Student nurse giving a patient a metabolism test/Library of Congress

As I sit in the classroom and hear my colleagues talk about their clinical instructors, I remember my own and think to myself that I’m the one who had the meanest clinical instructor: She kept us in clinical for our entire allotted time. Not only that, but she frequently reminded us of the importance of our clinical rotation by saying things like “you are paying for an education,” “this will help you to be successful in your NCLEX preparation,” and “you will become a great nurse.”

In some ways that clinical instructor reminded me of Mary Poppins—she always carried a bag and she seemed to pull an endless number of items out of its depths: NCLEX questions with a list of rationales; an NCLEX blueprint (she had a few copies); concept map templates; a medication book; even […]

2024-05-21T11:44:47-04:00May 21st, 2024|Nursing, Nursing education|4 Comments

Creating a Disaster Simulation for Nursing Students

A nursing student treats a volunteer acting as a disaster victim during a high-fidelity simulation at the University of South Carolina Aiken Convocation Center. Photo courtesy of the authors.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the United States “there were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020.” With the number of disasters increasing in recent years, preparedness is crucial.

Many simulationists may believe that creating a disaster simulation is complicated, expensive, and requires a lot of resources. The opposite is true if you have enough support from your organization and community. The only cost incurred during our disaster management simulation project for nursing students at our institution was the cost of make-up to create realistic wounds.

Finding a gap in student knowledge.

The first thing we did was to perform a needs assessment. We knew that our students were not well prepared in our program for caring for patients during a disaster. In the past, this area of content was never really addressed in our curriculum. As we were […]

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