Registered Nurse Motivation and Comfort with Teaching in an Interprofessional Educational Clinic
Background:
The Duke Interprofessional Education (IPE) Experience allows multiple pre-licensure professional programs, including MD, PA, DPT, BSN, and NP, to provide team based care to patients in the emergency department (ED) during weekday evenings. All care is provided with direct MD faculty supervision. Registered nurse (RN) faculty help facilitate patient care, supervise their program’s students, and educate all students in clinic (not just nursing students). Like all clinical faculty that participate in this experience, this position is voluntary but compensated. The RNs are current ED certified nursing staff. We wanted to understand the motivating factors for RN faculty participation as well as their level of comfort in this educator role.
Design:
All RN faculty registered to work during the 2019-2020 academic year were sent an electronic Qualtrics survey (n=26). The questions looked at basic demographics, level of comfort in clinic, and motivating factors to participating in the IPE experience.
Results:
Response rate was 42%. Motivation was measured with a slider where 0 indicated not a motivator and 100 was a strong motivator.
Questions to judge motivation: Mean Median (range)
Personal interest in education of IPE students 72 70 (30-100)
Opportunity for professional growth/advancement of my own education/career 58 50 (20-100)
Intellectual challenge 44 34 (4-100)
Desire to share knowledge of nursing profession and scope of practice 72 70 (28-100)
Financial compensation 84 90 (17-100)
The survey also asked if the RNs felt empowered to teach all students. Forty-five percent answered extremely comfortable and 45% were somewhat comfortable. The remaining 10% gave the neutral response, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. The next question asked if the RN faculty felt comfortable providing constructive feedback to all students. Only 27% of nurses felt extremely empowered to give constructive feedback to students of all professions with an additional 64% being somewhat comfortable.
Conclusions:
Registered nurses are motivated to participate in this clinical IPE experience. Although financial compensation is important, the RNs also report additional altruistic characteristics which motivate them to voluntarily participate and educate students within the IPE experience. The RN faculty have different levels of confidence in their teaching roles.
Reflections:
It is important to recognize that hospital staff RNs (not nursing school faculty) participate in ward teaching experiences for many reasons, including financial compensation, teaching opportunities, and sharing the scope of nursing practice. This survey has allowed clinical leadership to develop faculty programs to promote teaching skills, especially in providing feedback.
