Nurse educators are truly valuable teachers, researchers, leaders, and scholars dedicated to advancing the nursing profession. As editors of Nursing Education Perspectives, we are grateful for the many contributions of nurse educators around the globe who advance the science of nursing through their scholarly work in education and practice while preparing students for the workforce and advanced nursing education. Educators also provide invaluable service through their clinical practice in nurse-run clinics, public health, schools, and shelters, among other settings.
Now, as we bring another academic year to a close, we continue to grapple with challenges, such as our increasingly complex health care systems and competing demands for clinical placements. One of the most important issues to plague our profession is the shortage of faculty. Our numbers are not sufficient for graduating the numbers of nurses needed for practice. Each year, tens of thousands of qualified students are turned away from nursing programs because of the significant shortage of nurse faculty.
What must we, as a highly educated group of teachers, scholars, leaders, and scientists, do to recruit and, most importantly, retain nurse faculty? Recent data from a survey of 909 nursing schools nationwide (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2022) point to more than 2,000 full-time faculty vacancies and an 8.8 percent vacancy rate. Furthermore, we can anticipate the retirement of approximately one third of nurse faculty by 2025. Without an adequate pipeline to replace them, we will lose years of expertise, knowledge, and experience. With salaries and workload contributing to the recruitment challenge, it is critical that we identify how to retain our highly qualified novice and midcareer nurse faculty.
Mentoring is an excellent way to recruit and retain faculty. Novice nurse faculty often feel a lack of guidance and support as they enter their new role. Mentoring serves as a catalyst for demonstrating the important role we have in educating the future nursing workforce. Experienced faculty have a key role in supporting our colleagues and the next generation of nurse faculty and nurse faculty leaders, helping them navigate the competing roles of teaching, scholarship, and service. The newly revised National League for Nursing Mentoring Toolkit (NLN, 2022) offers suggestions for building strong mentoring programs that support both the mentor and the mentee.
There is limited research measuring the outcomes of mentoring, but it seems that novice and midcareer faculty can easily identify when there is a lack of mentoring. The key to a strong mentoring relationship is a mutual and trusting relationship. Formal mentorship programs are rare, and often, in the absence of a formal process, colleagues with common teaching or scholarship interests form informal mentoring relationships. Mentoring requires a time commitment on the part of both the mentor and the mentee that can lead to a sense of belonging, increased productivity, greater satisfaction, and a willingness to stay in nursing education. For the mentor, mentoring also provides satisfaction and fulfillment. Mentoring is often just one of the many roles that seasoned and experienced faculty fill, with little recognition for the commitment of time and effort involved.
How do we find that balance for the mentor and the mentee? There are important questions to address through our scholarly work: How will we be able to educate and graduate sufficient numbers of nurses if we continue to have a shortage of well-qualified nursing faculty? What can we do to support our novice nurse faculty colleagues, and what are the critical outcomes of mentoring this new generation of nurse faculty? How do we best support our mentors? What are the measurable outcomes for mentors?
As we search for evidence to advance the science of nursing education, it is important to support our mentors and mentees through research that demonstrates the valuable outcomes of mentoring. This is an important use of our time and talent and an investment in the future of our discipline as nurse educators. Nursing education is the link to solving the nursing shortage. Research that demonstrates the influence of nurse faculty on the nursing shortage and ways that we can support novice and midcareer nurse faculty through mentoring is one solution.
The Research Briefs section of Nursing Education Perspectives is the perfect place to disseminate the findings of single-site and feasibility studies that serve as a foundation for larger studies and provide evidence to support the roles of novice, midcareer, and experienced nurse faculty. We must implore our funding agencies and institutions of higher education to support mentoring. I look forward to your submissions and the evidence you provide on the importance of supporting nurse faculty. Thank you for your commitment to advancing the science of nursing education through your research.
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