Mercer launches Ph.D. program in nursing education
Pulse editor
Sunday, January 18, 2009
At a time when demand for nurses is at its highest level, nursing schools across the country are turning down applicants to their baccalaureate and master’s degree programs. They simply don’t have the faculty to teach them.
“We aren’t seeing nurses in their late 20s and early 30s applying for faculty positions,” said Susan Gunby, dean of the Georgia Baptist College of Nursing at Mercer University in Atlanta. “Our applicants are in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and while we’re glad to see them entering teaching, we have to have some younger people in the pipeline.”
BARRY WILLIAMS / AJC Special
Susan Gunby (left) is dean of the Georgia Baptist College of Nursing at Mercer University in Atlanta. Linda Streit is associate dean for the graduate program.
Besides classroom teaching, nursing instructors must stand up to demanding 12-hour shifts when supervising students during clinical rotations.
Mercer plans to address a key factor in the nursing shortage by educating more nursing instructors. The school has established a new Ph.D. program in nursing education and will enroll its first eight students this fall.
“There are other doctoral nursing programs in the state, and each is unique in its focus. Our intention is to develop nursing scholars for careers in education, research and practice,” Gunby said.
She expects the program to appeal to master’s-prepared nurse educators and will draw students nationally due to Web-enhanced classes. Students would spend limited amounts of classroom time on campus (intense weeks or long weekends at the beginning of courses, for instance) followed by online instruction, which allows students to work while earning their degrees.
Mercer’s program will have three areas of concentration: education, ethics and clinical scholarship. Graduates will be prepared to do cutting-edge research, teach the future generation of nurses, work as an expert in clinical areas or launch an entrepreneurial health care endeavor.
Gunby is proud of the new program and thinks that it focuses on what nurses need to be successful as educators, experts and researchers in today’s complex health care environment. At the beginning of the program, “pathways” courses will teach the basics of scholarship, scholarly writing for publication and grant-writing.
“This is the real nuts-and-bolts type of practical information that most of us were never taught and had to learn on our own,” said Gunby.
Extensive background work and study went into making the curriculum relevant.
“All of us have had to take courses that weren’t very practical,” she said. “Everything these students write could become a presentation or a publication. We want them to see outcomes and that they are really making a contribution. They are going to learn things that they can really use.”