Concerns about the scholarly development of the nursing profession and the academic nursing pipeline

While concerns abound globally with regard to the preparation of the future nursing workforce, in relation to issues such as safe staffing, workplace wellbeing and pay and conditions, one additional concern for us is the lack of strategic planning for higher-level development within the profession. Indeed, this prompted us to recently write about this issue, suggesting a “call to action” in order to spearhead a critical discussion on the scholarly development of nursing.

Termed the “clinical-academic divide” by authors there is now an urgent shortage of future faculty to prepare nurses of the future and limited scholarly development within the discipline. This is now at crisis point and urgent action needs to be taken. These challenges are faced by nurses globally. There are also some examples of proactive steps to address this, with countries such as Spain, where in the early 2000, a career framework was created that facilitated increasing the number of Masters’ prepared nurses as part of the workforce as well as investing in PhD preparation and training. At the same time, investment in education of nurses to Masters’ and PhD level also has to make economic and clinical sense.