Resisting the Downward Pressure on Nursing Faculty Qualifications

For more than a decade, the Institutes of Medicine and other organizations have exhorted health-care leaders to address performance deficiencies that lead to avoidable errors by enhancing the knowledge base, technological acumen, interdisciplinary competencies, and evidentiary transformation of practice. Yet lawmakers concerned about a shortage of bedside nurses are calling on state boards of nursing to relax faculty qualifications-a move that would undermine rather than reinforce the transfer of knowledge and skills on which effective and safe nursing practice relies. Workforce planners assert that reducing faculty qualifications would relieve the nursing faculty shortage-one barrier to graduating more nurses faster. Their emphasis on numbers alone ignores the consensus of health-care policy experts that the sophistication and complexity of nursing practice require a faculty that, at all program levels, has graduate preparation in nursing science and pedagogy. Tension between industry's demands for quantity and the demands of health-care experts for quality becomes still more trenchant in light of the emerging vision for health-care reform, which prioritizes wellness, prevention, and primary care-and places nurses center stage. This article states the case for maintaining high academic standards for nursing faculty and explains the need for innovative solutions to the faculty shortage while protecting the quality of care through direct practice and progress in nursing science.