Clinical Nurse Educator

Baccalaureate nursing practice incorporates the roles of assessing, critical thinking, communicating, providing care, teaching, and leading. (Grand Canyon University College of Nursing [GCUCN], 2011, p. 2) A nurse providing

Nurse Educators are indirect care advanced practice nurses while Nurse Practitioners are primarily direct care practitioners. With direct care the practitioner uses their clinical expertise to assess, diagnose, treat and educate the client. Nurse educators are in key positions to promote leadership. Nurse educators serve as leaders to their colleagues. They develop relationships with new nurses and groom the nurse to their fullest potential to promote their professional development and facilitate their personal leadership abilities.

The webinar titled “Succeeding as a Nurse Educator” was presented by Diane Billings, EdD, RN, FAAN. The three objectives for the webinar were to be able to “differentiate between the roles of faculty appointment: teaching, service, and scholarship; implement strategies for working smarter, not harder; and develop a career plan for success as a nurse educator” (Billings, 2013).

Nurse educators (NEs) possess competencies such as facilitation of learning, fostering development of the learner, socialize the learner to integrate behaviors and values within the nursing profession, use of assessment and evaluation strategies, develop and

A nurse educator has a didactic role in which she works to educate and guide future nurses and other healthcare providers. A NP is trained to provide health promotion and maintenance along a continuum, she has a hand?s on approach and interacts directly with patients and their family members. A NI streamlines information and acts as a spearhead for EHRs. A nurse executive is responsible for the nursing care of her organization.

According to Shellebarger & Edwards (2012), Nurse Educators help shape the future of nursing by educating future novice nurses. Nurse Educators have a core curriculum to follow to ensure lifelong learning in their role. They help shape critical thinking skills in our future nurses by giving them the knowledge needed to think critically. “ Evidence has found that hospital based nurse educators influence safe patient outcome through contemporary evidence based teaching and their contribution of policy development supports safe practice” (Sayers,2012, p. 45). Nurse Administrators take on the role of patient advocates, by ensuring that patients are receiving the highest level of care (Hamic, Hanson, Tracy, & O’Grady, 2014). Nurse Administrators are an important part of management of nurses , they help develop policies and procedures and are change agents in their fields. The Nurse Educator and the Nurse Administrator should be

In the Certified Nurses Assistant or CNA services, you have to be trained. The training for being a CNA you need to have basic nursing principles and do clinical work while being supervised. You also have to be qualified to be one. You need to have your High School diploma or GED, nursing assistant training, which is about 6-12 weeks, basic training skills, Anatomy/physiology credit, and infection control.

“They sound great... Oh… Wait we can’t hire them”, my boss stated as she hands me a small pile of applications back. “Well, why not? They have the proper training and they’ve been a CNA for as long as I have. You know just as well as I do that we need all the help we can get. Especially, since I’m on the desk until my doctor releases me to work on the floor.” “I know we need the help but we already have one guy hired and we can’t hire another one. You would have to switch cares all the time because upstairs we have 5 women-only cares and at least 3 women-only cares down stairs. That would just be such a hassle if you girls are in the middle of cares with a resident and then we have to find cares you can switch with him…. It just wouldn’t be fair to you girls.”

With the help of nurse educators, they are there to educate and teach students, patients, and caregivers about disease prevention and management and health care promotion. The fascinating thing is that being prepared from a master’s program is always constant learning. Not only do the prepared nurses builds on the baccalaureate level, but they are always on their feet to discover new and creative ways to deliver patient-centered care. The master’s prepared nurse would constantly be attending meetings and conferences to come up with better ideas to promote and provide health care, simultaneously learning new things. Sometimes, they may think they know almost everything about healthcare, but when the world is constantly evolving, healthcare would constantly be changing too. Attending meetings, promoting health care, learning and then bringing all those knowledge back to patients and nurses is what keeps patient care great. The role of the master’s prepared nurse provides not just hands on patient care, but they are also prepared to expand their knowledge and pass it on to future nursing candidates to continue to deliver the best quality

Both the DNP and PhD nurse educators are critical in helping build a nursing workforce that iscapable of increasing complex demands of the nations health care system. DNP nurses in advance proactice nursing roles are able to implement ways to improve nursing practice, patient population and a focus on patient outcomes. O'Lynn (2015) states that a nurse educator track for DNP students would greatly increase the nursing faculty and allow more students into nursing

Vital to the nurse educator role, the competencies incorporate the ability to facilitate learning and student development while functioning within the educational environment, use assessment and evaluation strategies while involved in curriculum design and quality improvement, and function as a change agent while pursuing quality improvement and engaging in scholarship. Although Cangelosi et al. (2009) report that many clinicians would enjoy participating in opportunities fulfilling competency development, they feel they have little or no preparation for attainment; Landers (2000) believes that full comprehension of the role cannot be gained through lecture of vicarious

Education has been a large part of the NLN for a long time. The specialty area of nurse education was not always seen as a certification, but with the NLN it is a certification today. In the 1980s, it was suggested that nursing education should be a specialty, but it did not gain popularity that early (Nick, J. M. & Sharts-Hopko,et al.). Moving forward to 1999, the NLN conducted a survey to asses the need, want, and idea of a nurse educator certification. From a random mailing survey, the NLN received more than 3,000 results indicating that nursing faculty and academic nursing administrators (Nick, J. M. & Sharts-Hopko,et al.). These results concluded that 92 percent of faculty and 84 percent of administrators perceived the nurse educator

The role of the nurse educators is to identify that gap and bridge that missing link within the education curriculum to address these learning issues. According to Arnold (2015), nursing students need to learn how to work with other professional disciplines early within the nursing program. This process leads to students will gaining more insights toward communicating with other professionals and gaining leadership qualities early; thereby, they will continue to build upon these concepts throughout the nursing program.

Academic nurse educators engage in a number of roles and functions, each of which reflects the core competencies of nursing faculty. Those competencies include the following: 1) facilitate learning, 2) facilitate learner development and socialization, 3) use assessment and evaluation strategies, 4) participate in curriculum design and evaluation of program outcomes, 5) function as a change agent and leader, 6) pursue continuous quality improvement in the nurse educator role, 7) engage in scholarship, and 8) function within the educational environment

Nurse educators must be able to function efficiently within the academic community and organizational environment. The educators must understand and embrace their role as an educator in the academic setting and must align with the faculty in the other academic units and also with the administration. The nurse educator must be attuned to the academic institution`s environment and to the economic and sociopolitical aspect of higher education in which it functions (Caputi, 2015).