August 16, 2006--For Lack of a Ph.D. the Patient Died

We will need 200,000 new nurses by 2020. This is largely because we have an aging population who will live longer than previous generations and eventually all of them (us) will wind up for at least a time in hospitals or other kinds of care facilities.

In the past, when faced with less acute nursing shortages, we as a nation raised nurses’ pay and welcomed RNs from overseas. That helped. But we are now faced with another set of issues as we attempt to train the nurses we will need—according to a recent piece in the NY Times (linked below) there are enough qualified applicants to nursing schools to meet this demand, but record numbers are being turned away because there are not enough nursing teachers available to staff the required classes and clinical settings. In 2005 alone, there was no room for 150,000 who otherwise would have been accepted.

What’s the problem? Why are there too few teachers? Shouldn’t it be easy to lure qualified nurses into classrooms, away from 12-hour shifts in overcrowded hospitals and nursing homes?

The quick and easy answer is that nursing instructors make less money than those working in clinical settings. But a closer look reveals the real problem—the very few nurses in clinical settings who have Ph.D. degrees make more money than nursing instructors. And since colleges of nursing require their instructors to have Ph.D.s they cannot compete with hospitals that hire Ph.D.s to fill senior management positions and pay more.

There is thus a simple solution—nursing schools should stop requiring instructors to have Ph.D.s. What does having a Ph.D. in nursing have to do with teaching the next corps of clinical nurses?

I ask what the course described below, which is required of all Ph.D. students at New York University, what does any of it have to do with qualifying someone to teach future nurses? This comes directly from the NYU catalog:


Contemporary Nursing Research

Course content emphasizes the development of scholarly inquiry in nursing science through the critical analysis of nursing concepts, theories and models from their original to their current state. Applicability of course content to student’s independent research is emphasized. Students examine and evaluate scholarly inquiry in nursing for past, current, and future contributions to the discipline. This course is the first to introduce theoretically based research with consideration to the priority of identifying research questions related to increasing the understanding of health care outcomes for diverse populations.

“Scholarly inquiry in nursing science through the critical analysis of nursing concepts”? Help me here. I’ve even been an academic, but I do not for the life of me get why the person who will minister to me at Lenox Hill Hospital has to be taught by someone who was required to take this course and others that are similarly theoretical.

Actually, literally for the life of me, I’d rather have Mary Malone, who actually cared for me at Lenox Hill, teach the next group of nurses who I will probably soon be needing. A little less “theoretically based research,” please, and a little more practical knowledge and experience.

Ph.D.s need not apply.