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The United States faces a crisis in health care due to a growing need for a baccalaureate-prepared nursing workforce. The Institute of Medicine (IOM, 2011) set a 2020 goal to increase the proportion of nurses with a bachelor's degree or higher to at least 80% of nurses in the U.S. workforce. Between 2004 and 2017, the average proportion of nurses with a baccalaureate degree who were working in acute care settings grew from 44% to 56%. However, nursing faculty shortages have tempered this growth. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2019) estimated that in 2018, approximately 75,000 qualified applicants were turned away from baccalaureate and graduate programs due to insufficient numbers of faculty.
Recruitment of nurse clinicians into academic nursing has played an important role in addressing the faculty shortage (Laurencelle et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2017). A desire to influence the next generation of nurses motivated many expert clinicians to make the transition into academic nursing as novice teachers (Evans, 2018; Hunter & Hayter, 2019; Laurencelle et al., 2016). A positive transition into academic nursing may influence their job satisfaction and subsequent intent to stay (Lee et al., 2017). Understanding their experiences as new faculty could provide insights into how to ease their transition and improve faculty retention (Laurencelle et al., 2016). Therefore, a meta-synthesis of existing qualitative evidence was undertaken to answer the following question: How do graduate-prepared nurse clinicians (population) experience the transition from clinical practice to nursing faculty (phenomenon of interest) in an academic setting (context)?
Method
Search Strategy
The search strategy was designed to identify publications from peer-reviewed journals (Figure 1). The following databases were searched: CINAHL®, PsycINFO®, PubMed®, MEDLINE®, and ProQuest®. The reference lists of identified articles were searched for additional studies and yielded one additional study. Key search terms included role, transition, nursing education, clinician, lecturer, and academic nurse educator. An initial search was conducted in September 2014 and updated in January 2019. All of the studies identified during the database search were assessed for relevance to the review based on information provided in the title, abstract, and descriptor/MeSH terms. A full report was retrieved for all...