Continued from Page 2

Providing baccalaureates to people who are not nurses remains expensive, according to educators who run nursing school programs. The University of San Diego Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science offers a bachelor’s for registered nurses, thereby cutting some of the prohibitive costs of instructor-intensive training, said Anita Hunter, MSN, PhD, CPNP, CNS, an associate professor who directs the program as well as the school’s master’s program for non-nurses.

Her 24 RN bachelor’s candidates need less clinical experience and therefore cost less, she said.

Forming faculty

Faculty at USD also are developing an accelerated doctoral track to produce nursing instructors in addition to the school’s full range of nursing degree programs.

While master’s-prepared nurses like Boshears can teach at the junior college level, where about two-thirds of all nurses are trained, only doctoral-prepared nurses are eligible for tenure in California’s four-year public universities. They account for nearly 60% of unfilled faculty positions in the United States, according to numbers released by the AACN in June 2003.

A 2002 University of California report found that 345 faculty positions were vacant in California, a number projected to double during the next five years.

In June, the University of California, San Francisco started offering an accelerated doctoral program, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, said Mark Boone, director of development for the school of nursing.

Ten nursing school graduates receive $60,000 per year for three years, enough to allow them to study full time, thereby shortening the usual path to a doctorate from eight years to three. The AACN has reported that the median age of full-time nursing faculty is 51.5 years old. An accelerated doctoral preparation means instructors can start their careers earlier and teach longer, thus helping to alleviate the shortage of teachers, Boone said.

The effort to recruit faculty extends beyond academic institutions. Nurses for a Healthier Tomorrow, a coalition of nursing and health care organizations dedicated to attracting people to nursing, has started its own outreach campaign through nursing journals, advertisements, and media to recruit nurse educators.

But increasing the number of qualified instructors alone does not solve the problem, said USD’s Hunter.

“Universities and colleges have to look at valuing nursing faculty at the same level as other professional faculty,” she said. “That is not the case now.”

Hunter said nursing faculty, which deals with human sociology, does not attract the large grants that the faculty of hard sciences brings in.

Furthermore, nurses trained at the graduate-school level have other, more lucrative, career choices. Pharmaceutical companies, information technology companies, and managed care firms recruit these highly trained professionals.

Even working in an emergency department will pay a master’s-prepared nurse practitioner about 25% more than the same nurse working as a professor, according to the 2003 National Salary Survey of Nurse Practitioners.

Few people become teachers for the money, said Berman of Samuel Merritt. Many choose faculty positions because they have a passion and a knack for teaching.

Instructors at Samuel Merritt try to identify students they think would make good faculty. Those students are mentored and encouraged to earn the kind of degrees and experience that would allow them to teach, Berman said.

The school also partners with Kaiser Permanente, John Muir/Mt. Diablo Health System and Sutter Health to identify practicing nurses who would make good clinical faculty.

Jennifer Jacoby, RN, MSN, chief nursing officer of the Sharp Metropolitan Medical Campus, said she has a couple of full-time employees who spend 20% of their time serving as clinical faculty at partner schools.

“I let them hire someone who has benefits and educational capacity,” Jacoby said.

Sharp’s approach illustrates how health care providers can benefit from helping schools. By providing such clinical instructors, as well as clinical rotation space, grants, scholarships, and donations to programs like Nurses Now, Sharp hopes to lure graduating nurses to its facilities.

“You’re sort of hoping that while they’re here, you have done something that makes them want to come back,” Jacoby said.

To comment on this story, send e-mail to editorca@nurseweek.com.