Nurse educators have a message to send to nurses and the nation. In a nutshell, it's "Help - we have a crisis here!"

"Everyone has read about the nursing shortage," said David Bennett, RN, Ph.D., chair of the WellStar School of Nursing at Kennesaw State University. "As a result we have an increased pool of qualified nursing students. There were 600 applicants for our 80 slots this fall and we're planning to expand our nursing school by teaching year round. The challenge is finding the faculty to teach."

Ironically, the nation's critical demand for nurses, which has raised salaries and professional opportunities, has contributed directly to the lack of nurse educators.

"Teaching applicants are excited about the quality of our school and they're excited about teaching. They want to be part of a program that is preparing nurses for the future, but when we tell them the salary, their faces just fall," said Richard Sowell, RN, Ph.D., FAAN, dean of KSU's WellStar College of Health and Human Services.

Last year, Kennesaw lost two instructors with master's degrees to clinical jobs paying $30,000 a year more. It's a common story at colleges.

"The nursing shortage has set up a competition between nursing education and practice," Sowell added.

It's a competition that public and even private universities can't win at present salary levels.

"A master's-prepared nurse can earn $75,000 to $100,000 annually in a clinical setting. Even seasoned, tenured faculty (many with doctoral degrees) aren't going to make more than $65,000 to $75,000," said Susan Gunby, RN, Ph.D., dean and professor at Georgia Baptist College of Nursing at Mercer University.

"In many cases, we have newly graduated nurses earning the same salaries as full professors," Bennett said.

To compound the problem, not enough nursing graduate students are coming up through master's and doctoral programs to teach swelling undergraduate enrollments or replace existing and maturing faculty.

Aging faculty members
"The average age of a nursing educator is about 53, which means that in eight to 10 years a lot of faculty will be retiring," Gunby said.

The Georgia Nurses Association expects a quarter of the state's nursing faculty to retire or resign in the next four years.

"We have got to invest more in nursing education," Sowell said.

While Kennesaw State University has funded new faculty positions and requested a much-needed new health science building (which didn't make the University System funded projects list), Sowell and Bennett believe that more drastic measures are needed.

Universities need to realize that the health care market has changed. If universities are going to attract the bestqualified teachers, salary levels of faculty have to be more comparable to the market value of clinical nurses.

Failing to find enough doctoral-prepared applicants, colleges have turned to hiring more nurses with master's degrees as temporary and adjunct faculty, particularly for clinical courses. Only 419 graduated this spring from the 88 U.S. nursing schools with doctoral programs, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

"We don't have the option of increasing class size," Bennett said. The Georgia Board of Nursing mandates a 1:10 faculty/student ratio for clinical nursing instruction and even smaller ratios for pediatric and critical care settings.

"We have record enrollment (431) at Mercer and our ratios are mostly 1:6 at clinical sites, because the acuity level of the patients is so high," Gunby said. "If you've got eight students with two patients each,that's a lot for one faculty member to supervise, to teach and care for patients."

With new confidentiality laws, more paperwork and hospital staff too overworked to train students, the job has become more challenging.

"Teaching is only one component of the faculty role," said Myra Carmon, RN, CPNP, Ed.D., associate professor at the Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing at Georgia State University. "We're expected to keep up our clinical skills, do research, write grants, publish articles and serve the community."

An educator for more than 20 years, Carmon also is the president of the Georgia Nurses Association.

"The best thing about teaching nurses is seeing your products go out into the community and make a difference. It's a psychologically and emotionally rewarding job, but there needs to be more financial rewards as well," Carmon said.

Some outside help

With most state budgets strapped or taking cuts, that will be an uphill battle, but colleges are getting some relief from private agencies which are funding faculty positions, according to Carmon. A case in point: the $528,000 gift of Tenet Healthcare Corp. to pay for additional faculty for the university's accelerated BSN program.

Other measures are helping to attract and retain new teachers.

"We're trying to prepare our master's and doctoral students to teach with more education courses. It's not enough to know your specialty, you need to know how to create a curriculum and engage students," Carmon said.

Georgia Baptist College of Nursing offers a non-credit nursing educator certificate that offers education training. The school only offers two master's concentrations: nurse educator and acute critical care.

"We chose those deliberately because of the critical need," Gunby said.

Recent nurse educator graduates were helped by the Georgia Nursing Faculty Scholarship Program, a new loan program designed to encourage Georgians to enter and remain in the nursing education profession. Students enrolled in a qualified educator program can borrow up to $10,000. Each year of teaching in a Georgia nursing college cancels $2,500 of the loan.

Through a Johnson & Johnson grant, KSU has established a mentor program that pairs veteran nursing teachers with new ones. In retreats and seminars, new teachers learn the basics of academic life: ethics, scheduling, teaching techniques and advising.

"We'd do this for new teachers anyway, but it would be on the run, as issues came up," said Lois Robley, RN, Ph.D., associate professor at KSU's nursing college. "It's exciting to have the time to be reflective and purposeful about what we're sharing, so that we can ignite a passion for teaching and offer them support as they do it."

After 25 years, Robley is still glad that she chose teaching.

"If you're a people person, what could be better than to teach nurses? I get a great rush seeing my nurses be successful in their profession and love nursing. The joy of teaching is in seeing what your students do," she said. "The profession has to find better ways to value and support educators. You don't have nurses without teachers."