There is a severe ongoing worldwide nursing faculty shortage (Nardi & Gyurko, 2013). Nurse educators with advanced preparation are needed to train the nurses anticipated to meet the demand health care globally. Nursing education in Palestine has evolved over a relatively short period where nurses are playing a major role in ensuring high quality of health care for the nation citizens. However, the Palestinian state is experiencing a significant shortage of nurse’s particular nurse educators. This shortage is expected to worsen as the needs for nurses and nurse’s educators sharply increases locally and globally due to the number of Palestinian citizens experiencing chronic illness such as strokes, heart diseases, asthma, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and cancer. This create a high demand of nurses, particularly, nurse’s educator to prepare sufficient number of knowledgably and skilled nurses to meet the demands of the nation.
In Palestine, there are seven Bachelor degree nursing faculties which provide large number of nursing graduates for the care of Palestinian individuals and communities. Several Master degree programs in nursing had also been developed in Palestine with different specialties such as critical care, nursing management, pediatric nursing, mother child health and community mental health nursing, that all lead to increase number of graduated nurses with Master degree. Therefore, the demand to develop a doctoral program in nursing become required to improve the quality of nursing in scientific research, enhanced critical thinking in clinical fields and to promote the academics in different nursing faculties.
Currently, more than 6000 nursing students are enrolled in 12 baccalaureate, and masters’ degree programs. Yet, these nursing students are served by only 18 doctoral prepared faculty. This is far below the Ministry of Higher Education, international accreditation institutions, and professional nursing organization standards of a 1:20 ratios of doctoral prepared faculty to students. It is estimated that more than 500 doctoral prepared instructors are urgently needed to meet the demand and alleviate the severe faculty shortage in Palestine. The same phenomena of nursing faculty shortage is manifested across all nursing diploma colleges in Palestine.
The major factor contributing to the faculty shortage is the lack of doctoral programs to prepare faculty. This finding is not surprising. In Palestine, for example, there are no existing doctoral programs to prepare qualified faculty. To attain these faculties, Palestinian universities are forced to send graduate students to seek degrees in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Jordan and Egypt. Such options are very expensive, with the total cost for individuals ranging between $90, 000-150,000. As well, these options are time consuming and impose an emotional and psychological burden on students and their families. It is imperative to prepare nursing faculty locally; both to alleviate the faculty shortage across Palestine and to save costs for the country.
Graduates from the doctoral program will be able to work as faculty members at any college of nursing inside, or outside, of Palestine that offer BSN, MSN, or PhD degree.
