The educational gaps of nurses in entrepreneurial roles: An integrative review

Nurse entrepreneurship remains a foreign concept in education, forcing nurses to turn to graduate degrees in business and finance or otherwise, learn 'as they go'. Before addressing the question 'Why does nursing curricula exclude business content and skill development?', one must evaluate the perceived educational gaps of current nurse entrepreneurs; the purpose of this integrative review. An initial total of 2485 articles was generated in September 2016, of which 15 methodologically-diverse studies, published between 1977 and 2015, were appraised using the QATSSD tool. Perceptions of business-related educational gaps were categorized into 4 leadership skillsets: cognitive, interpersonal, business and strategic. Cognitive skills were further subdivided into self-regulation, professional know-how, and grasping the larger context; Interpersonal skills consisted of networking and selling your services, dealing with contextual resistance, and communicating clearly; Business skills were regrouped into mitigating and managing risk, marketing, financial and operations management; and lastly, Strategic skills were all related to knowing how to start a business. Business mindedness is not readily integrated into our collective professional identity resulting in an exclusion of this content from nursing curricula. To address service gaps, nurses should be introduced to entrepreneurial concepts during initial training with an option of further specialization for those considering a business career.