Exploring dental faculty perceptions of current strategies and barriers to retention.

PURPOSE: The aims of the study were to identify perceived strategies for and barriers to faculty retention and examine differences regarding age, gender, and race. METHODS: Cross-sectional data was captured from the eight author-affiliated dental schools. A Qualtrics survey was emailed to all faculty members at these institutions (1467 possible participants) between November 2021 and February 2022. The survey was formulated from best practices listed in the American Dental Education Association Faculty Diversity Toolkit. It consisted of 18 questions, including demographic information and faculty perceptions of their respective workplaces. These responses were then evaluated with descriptive statistics, Chi-squared analysis, Pearson Correlation, and Fleiss' kappa. RESULTS: The survey's response rate was 19.2%. There was no significant difference in perceived retention strategies across race, age, gender, practice tenure, practice type, or clinical versus tenure track. The top four barriers identified were inadequate financial compensation, workload, poor work environment, and burnout. There was a significant difference between racial groups and their perceived barrier of support for promotion (p = 0.048). This was more prevalent among clinical faculty (47.7%) than tenure track faculty (16.2%). The work environment was listed as a leading factor for both promoting retention and encouraging the exodus of faculty members. CONCLUSION: Strategies aimed at improving financial compensation, career recognition, and transparency of the promotion process, along with those aimed at improving the work environment were shown to be vital to retaining faculty. Though the low response rate is a study limitation, these findings provide valuable information and a framework for future studies regarding dental faculty recruitment and retention.

Improving Global Health and Nursing's International Influence.

The increasing power and political involvement of nurses globally via international nursing organizations, such as Sigma Theta Tau, International and the International Council of Nurses, as well as in International Health Organizations, like Partners in Health, are discussed in this paper. The voice of nurses, like Holly Shaw at the United Nations, and influence of nurses in leadership positions, like Shelia Davis at Partners in Health, are examples of nurses using increasing power and influence in improving health globally. A brief nursing perspective on power is also included.

Nursing and midwifery advocacy to lead the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was implemented on January 1, 2016 and is composed of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and further delineated by 169 targets. This article offers background information on the 2030 Agenda as it relates to nursing and midwifery, professional organizational initiatives currently advancing the SDGs, the ethos of global citizenship, the urgency to respond to dwindling planetary health, the salience of nursing and midwifery advocacy in SDG attainment, and the myriad opportunities for nurses to lead and collaborate toward realizing these Global Goals. A US-based perspective is employed to underscore the Agenda's relevance to the US nursing workforce and healthcare system. The SDGs, with their holistic bio-psycho-social-environmental approach to health, present enormous opportunities for nurses and midwives. The SDG framework is naturally aligned with the foundational philosophy and purpose of our professions.

Multi-ethnic high school students' perceptions of nursing in the USA and Israel: a descriptive quantitative study.

BACKGROUND: In order to target new recruits or future generation of ethnic minority nurses about their potential fit in nursing, it is necessary to understand their perceptions of the profession. Successful recruitment of high school students into nursing in part requires congruency between perceptions of an ideal career and perceptions of nursing as a career. The purposes of this study were to compare ethnic minority high school students in the USA and in Israel on their perceptions of nursing as a career, and to understand how those perceptions compare to their perceptions of an ideal career. DESIGN: A descriptive quantitative design was employed to study a sample of 330 ethnic minority high school students from the USA and from Israel. METHODS: The Mann-Whitney U procedure was used to compare the groups' perceptions; a two-sided Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test was used to determine the differences between their perceptions of an ideal career and of nursing as a career. RESULTS: The USA students had more positive perceptions of nursing as a career than did the Israeli students. Both groups of students did not perceive nursing as an ideal career: They perceived nurses as hard workers, performing arduous tasks and busy work, not academically challenged, with limited opportunity for leadership and autonomy, and earning less money than they would want in an ideal career. Caring for others was a highly valued attribute for an ideal career and for nursing as a career. CONCLUSION: A minority career development plan that underscores the positive attributes of nursing should be designed in both the USA and in Israel for ethnic minority high school students. The plan should effectively communicate nursing as a caring profession that is academically rigorous and intellectually challenging with available leadership opportunities in institutions and society.

Integrating the core professional values of nursing: a profession, not just a career.

To meet the predicted deficit of more than 1 million nurses by 2020, traditional nursing recruitment must target previously un-recruited populations, as well as a culturally diversified workforce to include variations in age, ethnicity, gender, life style, national origin, and sexual orientations. As diversity increases, differences must be bridged to acculturate new nurses to recognize and identify with a shared nursing ideology and culture. The core professional nursing values (CPNVs) impart a common foundation that unites students and nurses in a meaningful, collective culture. Baccalaureate nursing programs actively promulgate these professional nursing values, however, methods to incorporate them into curricula are often absent from the literature. Following an intervention integrating the CPNVs into academic education, students affirmed the usefulness of this approach describing that the integration of the core values created a shared culture of professional nursing and deepened their commitment to the profession. Incorporating the CPNVs provided a promising approach that bridged the cultural chasm of a highly diverse student population and the profession of nursing by creating a shared professional culture across the myriad differences.

Urban high school students' perceptions of nursing as a career choice.

One hundred and fourteen high school students (n = 114) completed the Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs Questionnaire. A two-sided Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test revealed that students perceived an ideal career as having more power, more positive evaluation, and less activity than a career in nursing would. The areas of greatest perceived disparity and those that showed nursing less favorably were making decisions for one's self, always having a job, working in a safe place, making a lot of money, and earning appreciation and respect. Areas in which nursing appeared more favorable were working with one's hands and being very busy. Caring for others and working hard were valued equally for both careers. Students' perceptions of nursing may have been based on misinformation, on a lack of awareness about the options available within the profession, or based simply on a higher regard for a different career. Future endeavors to recruit these students into nursing must include exposure to the multiple opportunities that await them as experienced by contemporary nursing professionals.