The practice role in the academic nursing community

The practice role of nurse educators has emerged as a mechanism to unite practice, research, and education. The long-term outcome of such a synthesis should be an improvement in the quality of nursing care delivered to clients. Clinically focused nursing research designed by nurse educators who maintain a practice role or nurse clinicians who maintain a teaching role has the potential to unify and thus advance the profession. The authors discuss the historical background from which the practice role evolved, and efforts of recent nursing leaders to facilitate the incorporation of the nursing practice role by educators. Models for faculty practice are identified, and advantages of faculty practice are reviewed. The authors also describe barriers to the establishment of faculty practice, contemporary developments impacting faculty practice, and research needed to advance faculty practice. Nurse educators in many academic communities in the 1990s are discovering that not only must they produce scholarly work in addition to their teaching and service to the university and community, but that they may also be under growing pressure to be engaged in clinical practice. This pressure may be self-imposed or may be an expectation of their colleagues in nursing education or the administrators of their nursing programs. The focus of this research brief will be to describe the historical background from which this "new" role evolved, to discuss strategies or models developed to facilitate the faculty practice role, and to identify faculty practice issues that have emerged with the adoption of this role in academia. An additional focus will be to critically review faculty practice-related research performed since Chicadonz' (1987) review.