Leveraging a Successful Faculty Practice Model to Recruit and Retain Early-Career Nurse Faculty

Abstract

Background: The shortage of nursing faculty is well documented as are the challenges of attracting and retaining early-career faculty, in part, due to difficulties transitioning expert clinicians into faculty roles. Problem: There is little guidance in the literature describing successful formal transition models. Approach: An urban College of Nursing Faculty Practice (CON FP) underwent an operational redesign beginning in 2014, resulting in an intentional success: a pipeline for attracting and developing early-career faculty. This article describes how the CON FP leverages faculty practice to develop early-career faculty. Outcomes: Across a 6-year time span, at least 20 early-career CON FP clinicians have transitioned to full-time faculty roles. In addition, CON FP clinicians provide more than 75 000 direct care nursing services and support more than 25 000 student clinical and project hours annually. Conclusions: We offer this early-career faculty practice pipeline model as a solution for attracting and growing a contemporary nursing faculty workforce.

Academic Nursing and Faculty Practice

“…5,6,11,17 Findings on the challenges associated with faculty practice for individual faculty as well as the nursing program/university include competing demands for time, decreased meeting attendance due to practice obligations, decreased engagement in academic role, impact on promotion, workload allocation issues, and financial issues including coding/billing and the sustainability of faculty practice and were supported by the literature. 11,12 Limitations Limitations of the study include small sample size, setting limited to large universities, and self-reported survey data. The number of faculty and administrators who were eligible to respond to the survey is unknown.…”

“…Additional challenges with regard to faculty practice and annual evaluations likely exist, such as the process and logistics of incorporating a practice evaluation into an academic evaluation; however, the extant literature has not investigated this challenge. Finally, workload adjustments to align teaching and practice schedules present another challenge as well as schedule conflicts between practice obligations and faculty activities 11. The purpose of this article is to describe faculty practice within the context of academic nursing as it pertains to scholarship and research, annual evaluations, promotion, support of faculty practice, and additional benefits and challenges.…”

“…3,4 Faculty practice has a positive impact on nursing education. [5][6][7] There are also noneducation benefits including positive patient outcomes, 8 collaborative opportunities for scholarship, [9][10][11] and recruitment, retention, and mentoring of faculty. 11 There are many challenges inherent to academic nursing, and there are additional unique challenges for faculty who engage in faculty practice and for nursing programs that have faculty practice.…”

“…[5][6][7] There are also noneducation benefits including positive patient outcomes, 8 collaborative opportunities for scholarship, [9][10][11] and recruitment, retention, and mentoring of faculty. 11 There are many challenges inherent to academic nursing, and there are additional unique challenges for faculty who engage in faculty practice and for nursing programs that have faculty practice. Promotion and/or tenure in academic nursing can be difficult to achieve and may be particularly challenging for those who simultaneously engage in faculty practice.…”

Faculty Practice as an Educational Strategy

“…The idea that faculty who engage in faculty practice have more limited time and availability than nonpracticing faculty should be further explored, as it has implications for workload determination. A review of how academic workload is determined may be merited as it has been reported that faculty practice provides protected time that positively impacts work-life balance 17 ; yet, workload allocation issues have been identified as a challenge associated with faculty practice. 13 Reviewing appropriate expectations with students may be necessary to set boundaries and maintain work-life balance, given the nature of an instantaneous, digital world coupled with faculty working remotely during regular business hours, evening, and weekend hours.…”