The shortage of the nursing faculty is the burning issue when compared to the shortage of the nurses. The policy change that an address this issue is the development of leadership program, to increases capacity including collaborations and initiatives. There is the need of development of the state wide best practice program for diverse nursing adjunct clinical faculty who are promoted from the position of Assistant Professor to full Professor. There is the need of method to determine the demand for RN through datasets as it will help in tracking the current and future capacity for traditional RN-BSN and second degree Master’s programs in a given state. Knowing the current and future workforce distributions will help determine the future pipeline projections regarding the faculty. Policy on establishment online centralized clinical faculty database will help improve the communication between the potential clinical faculty and the nursing programs. It will improve the connections of opportunities for employments (Smeltzer et al., 2015).
The health care organizations must have the mandatory policy of retaining the diverse faculty participating in education of the future nurse leaders and in conducting research to shape practice in the respective state. Further policy on expanding the number of qualified interprofessional faculty for educating the nursing student must be ensured. Such faculty may implement the interprofessional education models. Policy on establishing the state wide virtual Faculty Center of Excellence will help meet the needs of both current and future faculty needs. There is also need to reformulate the current college/university retirement policies for the faculty for continued faculty service. Such policy changes and leadership initiatives will help improve the faculty pool available to educate nurses. It will address the challenge related to the recruitment of the faculty, as well as retention (Feldman et al., 2015).
References:
Feldman, H. R., Greenberg, M. J., Jaffe-Ruiz, M., Kaufman, S. R., & Cignarale, S. (2015). Hitting the nursing faculty shortage head on: Strategies to recruit, retain, and develop nursing faculty. Journal of Professional Nursing, 31(3), 170-178.
Smeltzer, S. C., Sharts?Hopko, N. C., Cantrell, M. A., Heverly, M. A., Nthenge, S., & Jenkinson, A. (2015). A profile of US nursing faculty in research?and practice?focused doctoral education. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 47(2), 178-185.
