Wanted: Nurses who can teach

Devra Griffin has been a nurse for 20 years. She’s worked in pediatrics, spent eight years as a nurse practitioner in women’s health at a private medical practice, then joined The Westerly Hospital as a per-diem pediatric nurse.
As a mom with two children now, she doesn’t see herself working full time at a hospital again, but she does want to keep advancing in her career. Having trained junior nurses for years, she thought she might enjoy teaching, but she wasn’t sure what it would be like.
An “externship” sponsored by the Hospital Association of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island State Nurses Association made it easy to find out.
Started in 2005, the program pairs nurses with mentors at nursing schools across the state, offering them an opportunity to experience academic life in the hopes that they’ll enjoy teaching and become nursing professors – full-time, part-time or just for clinical practice.
Locally and nationwide, nursing faculty are in short supply, and that’s one of the main reasons for a growing shortage of nurses across the country. So far, said program coordinator Marcia Bliss, director of HARI’s Center for Health Professions, 26 nurses have been placed in externships, and by late spring, a total of 18 will have completed them.
In Griffin’s case, Bliss connected with the nursing department at Salve Regina University, which last fall assigned Griffin to work with two instructors: Eileen Gray, in pediatrics, and Maria Gilman, in obstetrics.
The program requires the “externs” to spend 20 hours with their academic mentors, but Griffin took a full day per week to work with them. She observed classes, watched clinical practice sessions, even attended faculty meetings.
“I had done a lot of teaching of new grads right out of school in the hospital, so I had an idea” of what teaching was like, Griffin said, “but I really enjoyed being on campus, and the students asking a lot of questions, and being able to share my experience in the hospitals.”
Griffin enjoyed it so much, in fact, that when at the end of the term, Salve Regina offered her a clinical adjunct professorship, she happily accepted. Every Tuesday, six students in the B.S.N. program train with her, working in units all across the hospital.
“It’s a little more work than I imagined, but it’s very rewarding to see them coming out of their shell and taking care of patients,” she said. “And it’s been a good review for me, taking care of all different kinds of patients … in the OR, the wound clinic, endoscopy.” Next fall, Griffin said, she actually wants to teach even more students, though still on the clinical side, and not as full-time faculty, because she likes working in the hospital and also wants time to be a mom. But she’s enthusiastic about the doors the externship opened for her.
“I think it’s a fabulous program,” she said.
Griffin is fairly typical of the nurses who have participated in that all are seasoned professionals who have gotten interested in teaching, or have been encouraged to try it, but aren’t quite ready to jump in, Bliss said. Many have their master’s degree already – a requirement to join any school’s nursing faculty – while others have used the program to help them decide whether to pursue an advanced degree.
“This gives them an opportunity to test the waters,” Bliss said. “They spend time in the clinical area, they go to faculty meetings, they go to classes, they spend time discussing ongoing career planning – there’s a lot of different facets to it. And it’s individually scheduled, individually structured for each person, because everybody is different.”
So far, none of the externs has gone straight from the program into a full-time teaching job, Bliss said, but that’s not really the expectation. Like Griffin, other participants have taken adjunct faculty positions, and many are supervising students’ clinical training, now with a better understanding of the students’ educational needs.
And that in itself is a big deal, said Patricia Thomas, the externship program liaison at Rhode Island College’s School of Nursing.
“I think that most nurses only have a recollection of nursing education from the perspective of the student, and this gives any nurse with even a glimmer of interest in teaching … an opportunity to see what the whole role [of a professor] looks like,” Thomas said.
The externs get a chance to experience academic life, Thomas noted, and they get to see what it’s like to shape a nursing curriculum, both for the classroom and at the clinical level.
“It really opens the window of what the role of a nurse educator can be like, the potential that it offers,” she said. “There are nurses who are wonderful educators in the clinical setting … and for a person who has the inclination to share knowledge, demonstrate learning and inspire others, nursing education is the place to be. It’s collegial, there’s a lot of collaborative work, there’s teaching, scholarship and research, along with community service. So for someone who wants to embrace a wider role in addition to direct nursing care or even staff development … it’s a wonderful opportunity.” But there is one big drawback to going into education that no externship can correct: Nursing professors don’t earn anywhere near as much as senior nurses in clinical practice, especially those in hospitals. It’s a challenge for nursing programs across the country.
And it’s an important reason why Denise Bezila, a current program participant who is clinical manager in the emergency department at the Providence VA Medical Center, doesn’t see herself pursuing a career in education anytime soon.
Bezila said she joined the program because she already supervises University of Rhode Island students doing their clinical work, and she realized she didn’t know as much as she wanted to be an effective teacher for them.
“I needed somebody who’s an expert to orient me,” she said. Her mentor, Anita Creamer, a RIC faculty member who directs the VA Nursing Academy, has worked with her and another extern, Diane Gerardi, teaching them about curriculum objectives, how to evaluate students’ progress, and other important aspects of nursing education.
But Bezila, who was first offered a faculty job soon after earning her master’s degree, said that with three children in college, she can’t imagine becoming a nursing professor right now.
“I’ve been a nurse for 32 years, and if I took a teaching position, I would be making as much or probably less than a nurse starting at the bedside,” she said. Next semester, she said, she may even have to stop working with students, because she’s too busy with other duties.
Yet Bezila also loves education – it’s what she specialized in when she earned her M.S.N. – and she’s not ready to dismiss it as an option at some point.
“I don’t know what my future holds,” she said. •