Clinical faculty: major contributors to the education of new CRNAS--part 2.

This study examines the important contributions of clinical faculty toward the education of the future workforce of Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs). Differences in workload, work activities and income among clinical faculty, academic faculty and nonfaculty are examined. This is Part 2 of a 2-part column. Part 1, published in the April 2008 AANA Journal discussed salaries, recruitment, and retention of CRNA faculty. The Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) faculty workforce is in healthcare settings delivering anesthesia throughout the country. The faculty workforce consists of a small core of academic faculty employed full time or part time by educational institutions and is joined by a large number of volunteer clinical faculty. Many studies of nursing programs focus on the academic faculty with much less focus on clinical faculty whose main responsibility is the delivery of patient care. This less visible component of the CRNA faculty workforce includes the largest number of faculty and provides much of the clinical teaching vital to the preparation of future CRNAs. The volunteer clinical faculty are critical to the success in education to ensure clinically competent nurse anesthetists; however , little is known about this large component of the faculty workforce. With the decision to move to doctoral preparation for entry into " nurse anesthesia practice by the year 2025 " 1 it is important to consider the important role fulfilled by unpaid clinical faculty and the implications of such a change on the workforce. Seventy-two nurse anesthesia programs provided data in the 2007 Survey of Program Directors on faculty within their programs. These programs identified a total of 294 full-time equivalent (FTE) employed faculty with 263 of these FTEs being CRNAs and 27 being non-CRNAs. There were 4,851 affiliated volunteer faculty of whom 3,465 were CRNAs. These programs employed from 0 to 24 FTE funded faculty members with an average of 4.09 (SD, 3.44) per program (median, 3). An average of 0.37 were non-CRNA positions. In sharp contrast, there was an average of 69.3 (SD, 104.5) and a median of 23.5 volunteer faculty per nurse anesthesia program, which included individuals who taught in the program clinically and/or academically. Of these, an average of 48.8 (SD, 71.7) and a median of 18 of these volunteer faculty were CRNAs, and an average of 20.08 (SD, 35.4) and a median of 4.5 were volunteer faculty other than CRNAs. The program directors identified a current need to fill …