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The EIN NPO has been awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct a national study of nurse faculty work-life. Reliable data on the current status of the nation’s nursing schools with regard to factors contributing to the faculty shortage will be critical to motivating, designing, and implementing effective strategies for change. While useful school-level data are available from several sources, data on representative samples of individual faculty members for establishing national norms are lacking. The national survey of nurse faculty will be designed to provide benchmark measures for assessing interventions supported by Evaluating Innovations in Nursing Education (EIN), provide a yardstick for nursing programs around the country to compare their faculty to those at similar institutions in their region, and yield a baseline snapshot for guiding and assessing the progress of national efforts to improve the work-life and retention of nurse faculty.

The project will study approximately 6,000 nurse faculty members employed at 300 randomly selected nursing education programs representative of the population by program type (BSN and ADN) and region of the country. Domains of questionnaire items in the survey will include characteristics of faculty workload, opportunities for professional development, satisfaction with aspects of the faculty role, levels of job stress and burnout (and underlying causes), and terms of work (e.g., salary, tenure status). Items and measures will be drawn from prior studies (e.g., NLN and NLN-Carnegie faculty surveys) whenever possible.

A measure assessing breadth of education based on self-appraisals of students is being designed and tested by the NPO with input from the National Advisory Committee and other national leaders in nursing education. Use of the measure by all programs associated with EIN is intended to assure that the interventions do not have an adverse impact on educational breadth. For example, interventions relying upon an enhanced role by hospitals in clinical education may be designed to prepare nurses who will be readily employed by those same hospitals. The new measure will assess whether their education, grounded in the practices of a single institution, prepares graduates for effective functioning in a wider range of institutions including non-hospital settings and for a broader spectrum of roles.

Creation of items for the measure has been guided by the competencies identified as critical to nursing education by the Baccalaureate Essentials, the Nursing Executive Center, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing and other key professional organizations. For each competency, a consensus has been sought as to discrete tasks whose performance signifies mastery of that competency. The tasks have been incorporated in surveys of students enrolled in the EIN programs (including comparison sites) asking them to rate their confidence in performing each task. A draft of 38 items was shared with 50 leaders in nursing education to determine: (1) if the items serve as valid indicators of performance with regard to the competences, and (2) if the questions are likely to elicit varied responses from students (and avoid floor and ceiling effects). The instrument has been revised and refined based on this input. Prior to use in the EIN program, it will be fielded to more than 300 students in ADN and BSN programs, at various stages of their education to assess variability of response and psychometric properties. Use of this measure throughout the EIN initiative will yield a meaningful analysis of breadth of education across the interventions and will also substantiate the usefulness of the instrument to the broader academic nursing community.