Political Astuteness of Nurse Educators

Nurses comprise the largest segment of the healthcare workforce. Although nurses have advocated for patients since Florence Nightingale’s time, advocating for changes in health policies that affect populations on a larger scale has not changed over time (Rasheed et al., 2020). Professional nursing associations, nurse educators, and the Institute of Medicine have all identified the need to educate nurses in advocacy and health policy. With the recent revision of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s Essentials publication, health policy has moved from an essential to a featured concept that is found in the competencies and subcompetencies of the domains. Therefore, it is imperative that nurse educators have the knowledge, or political astuteness, to teach health policy to the future nursing workforce. This study explored the political astuteness level from a national sample of 72 nurse educators teaching in pre-licensure programs. An electronic survey containing the Political Astuteness Inventory (Clark, 1984, 2008) and a demographics questionnaire that also included questions seeking comfort and enthusiasm levels when teaching health policy content was distributed via network and social media approaches. Although the results showed no significant difference in the political astuteness score mean between educators who are teaching health policy and educators who have not taught health policy in 24 months, there were statistically significant findings with political astuteness scores, comfort, and enthusiasm. This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge regarding levels of political astuteness in nurses. Recommendations for future research and implications for nursing education are included