A Report on Faculty Practice: Promoting Health in a Children's Day Centre

Abstract

Within the university academic community, schools of nursing have been attempting to carry out the university's goals of teaching, research, and service to the community. It is imperative that nursing demonstrate its competence in these areas if the profession is to reach a full collegial role within the academic community which has little tolerance for any discipline that seeks exemption from these responsibilities. Additional pressures exerted by leaders in the practice settings, demand that university faculty become more actively involved in demonstrating their skills and influencing the direction of change. Even though a small minority of nurse faculty members practice regularly, the vast majority are not influencing the quality of nursing care by their clinical input. At a time when the nursing profession is probably in its greatest state of flux, when it is crucial to assert the value of nursing in the changing health care system, and when public support needs wooing, nurse faculty members remain on the sidelines . . . The misuse of this large reservoir of talent is a great impediment to the progress of the profession . . . Students, by default of the faculty, must use staff nurses as models of clinical practice. These nurses are usually far less prepared than the nurse faculty members, and role induction suffers proportionately. (Christman, 1979, p.9)