enrollment is heartening, even as the profession evolves into something more complex. The job has certainly changed from when Backer was in school: “We were trained to give back rubs, help people eat and do bed baths,” she says. “People go into nursing for heartfelt reasons, but there has definitely been a change in expectations.” Expectations for nurse educators have shifted as well. The job demands they keep up with an ever-expanding body of health care knowledge, even as textbooks lag behind. “You can’t just teach to the book,” says Backer. “Teachers need the most current, online resources and access to real world examples.” They also need to know how to teach. That means successfully communicating information to a diverse set of students with different learning styles. (Nursing students often need a fair bit of hand holding, Summer says. “We were neurotic,” she says, “and in a state of panic all the time!”) But anxious students and high expectations are just add-ons to the root causes of the nurse/nursing educator shortage. The biggest problems are a lack of clinical space where students practice and a huge disparity in the pay a teacher can make as compared to a nurse working in the field. The situation is no better at private colleges and universities. “We absolutely do not have enough nurse educators,” Dean Casey Shillam, School of Nursing & Health Innovations, University of Portland, says. Even if there were an abundance of educators, the lack of clinical space squeezes the nursing pipeline to a drip. These clinical placements are required for all students. To get them, the schools must foster individual relationships with healthcare placement sites. This forces a competition between the programs where the students are the losers. The longitudinal study found that 95 percent of nursing programs had an individual or cohort denied placement from 2016 to 2020. Securing clinical space has always been difficult. The pandemic made it worse. “Placements in off-campus professional practice, hospitals, and community-based, long-term care has all diminished because the health systems are not functioning,” says Shillam. “They have no capacity to take students.” But perhaps the biggest barrier to becoming a nurse educator is money. Low nursing educator pay is the standard across the nation. According to the latest Nurse Salary Research Report issued by Nurse. “You can’t just teach to the book. Teachers need the most current, online resources and access to real- world examples.” CYNTHIA BACKER, INTERIM PROGRAM DEAN OF NURSING, PCC SYLVANIA Cynthia Backer, interim dean of nursing at PCC 23
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