Exploring faculty health and wellbeing: creating a caring scholarly community.

BACKGROUND

Nursing educators worldwide are challenged to integrate the care of culturally diverse people into coursework to prepare a nursing workforce to deliver culturally congruent care (CCC). Care that recipients consider safe, satisfying, and beneficial is the essence of CCC. To effectively teach and role model such care for students, it is important for faculty to experience it at work. While substantive literature exists on promoting health, wellbeing, and a healthy work environment for nurses in practice, there is a limited focus on these topics for nursing faculty.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to discover care practices that helped faculty teach students to provide CCC. This article reports' findings related to the theme that care is essential for the health and wellbeing of general nursing faculty who prepare students to provide CCC.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHOD

This qualitative ethnonursing research study, guided by the culture care theory, used open-ended interviews to discover care practices that enhanced faculty's ability to teach students to provide CCC. The study was conducted in two public university baccalaureate nursing programs in urban and rural settings in the Southeastern United States. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 27 tenured, tenured-track, and clinical nursing faculty. Interview data were analyzed using Leininger's four phases of ethnonursing data analysis. Qualitative criteria were used to ensure rigor and included participant confirmation of patterns and themes.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Faculty health and wellbeing were described as embracing each other's cultural similarities and differences, caring for self, caring for others, offering respect, and engaging in mentoring/co-mentoring. Evidence-based recommendations to promote faculty health and wellbeing are presented. Creating a caring scholarly community that supports nursing faculty health and wellbeing provided essential support for faculty who prepared students, often through role modeling, to provide CCC.