Our Mission
Evaluating Innovations in Nursing Education (EIN) supports evaluations of interventions that expand teaching capacity or promote faculty recruitment and retention in nursing schools. The program aims to increase the number of nursing school graduates by evaluating strategies that address the nurse faculty shortage. An important program activity will be disseminating successful strategies for widespread replication in other nursing education settings.
Background
The United States faces an escalating shortage of nurses, driven in part by an aging population and a shortage of available spaces in schools of nursing across the nation. According to data released in December 2009 by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, enrollment in entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs increased by 3.5 percent from 2008 to 2009, marking progress insufficient to catch up to what is projected to be a shortage of more than a quarter million registered nurses by 2025. Widespread concern over the nurse faculty shortage is evident in the reports of prominent nursing organizations, as well as in the activities of numerous state workforce centers. Awareness of the shortage’s consequences has fostered support by nurse educators, health care organizations and state agencies for diverse strategies to increase educational capacity throughout the country.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is committed to addressing the nursing shortage by: 1) building nurse leadership capacity; 2) improving the work environment for nurses and faculty; 3) finding innovative ways to educate more nurses; and 4) promoting awareness of their central role in the health care delivery system among policy-makers and the general public. RWJF supports a range of nursing programs through its program areas, Building Human Capital and Quality/Equality.
In support of its commitment to nursing and nursing education, RWJF established Evaluating Innovations in Nursing Education (EIN), which funds and supports evaluations of interventions that have demonstrated potential to achieve one or more of the following outcomes:
- Increased enrollment and teaching capacity.
- Improved faculty work-life and satisfaction.
- Enhanced faculty recruitment and retention.
By fostering replication of successful strategies to address the nurse faculty shortage, the program’s ultimate goal is to increase the numbers of nursing school graduates.
Read more detailed program information in EIN’s second Call for Proposals.
The objectives are to:
- develop and disseminate evidence of the intervention’s effectiveness in achieving these ends;
- foster replication of successful strategies in varied settings across the country; and
- assemble benchmark measures of key variables associated with the faculty shortage so that individual nursing schools can compare their status to national norms (e.g., number of graduated nurses per faculty full-time equivalent, faculty satisfaction, intent to leave the teaching profession).
