Transitional Experiences of New Nurse Educators in the Eastern Region of Ghana

Abstract

The transitioning of a clinical nurse expert to a new nurse educator comes with a new experience of different roles, responsibilities, and prospects. The nurse educator role is challenging to the new nurse educators and even more so when preparation, mentorship, orientation and support are lacking or ineffective. New nurse educators who enter the academic environment are expected to demonstrate knowledge of both the clinical and classroom environment. Such an expectation creates anxiety, role ambiguity, role strain, stress and frustration. This study sought to explore the experiences of new nurse educators as they pursue their academic goals. A qualitative exploratory descriptive design was used. Eleven full time new nurse educators who have been teaching for at most two years were purposively sampled from the Nursing and Midwifery Training Schools in the Eastern Region of Ghana. A semi-structured interview guide was used to collect the data and the analysis was done using Braun and Clarke’s phases of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013). The five themes (5) that emerged from the data were: expectations of new nurse educators, challenges of new nurse educators, information seeking strategies, identity formation strategies and adaptation strategies. The findings of the study revealed that new nurse educators had to deal with numerous challenges such as learning to teach without any formal preparation, poor mentorship and orientation programmes, stressful workload, unclear job description and lack of pedagogical knowledge. The study recommends that nursing education should focus on creation of structured mentorship, orientation, teacher preparation and faculty development programmes at Nursing and Midwifery Training Schools.