The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty in nursing education: a scoping review.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic influenced the delivery of nursing education worldwide. The objective of this scoping review was to map the existing research literature on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted faculty in nursing education professionally and personally.

Methods: The framework of Joanna Briggs Institute Manual for Evidence Synthesis guided the development of this scoping review. Publications were searched for in the following databases: Medline, Embase, CINAHL, ERIC, Epistemonikos, Cochrane, Web of Science, Scopus, in addition to Teacher Reference Center, and Google Scholar. Frequency counts were registered to record the characteristics of sources of evidence. Frequency counts and summarized descriptions were then used to understand how nursing faculty was affected professionally and personally.

Results: After screening a total of 8525 publications, 34 articles were found eligible for inclusion. The publications originated worldwide with the majority from North America and Asia. Included studies made use of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods to illuminate, experiences and descriptions of the challenges facing nursing faculty in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The nursing faculty was professionally impacted by COVID-19 pandemic as it led to an online working environment, challenging workloads, working hours, teaching methods, and less focus on research. The personal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty members was related to physical, emotional and social aspects.

Conclusions: This scoping review mapped the literature on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted faculty in nursing education professionally and personally. Nursing education was unprepared for such a crisis. Our findings call for future studies focusing on long term online working environment for nursing faculty is encouraged as it will benefit nursing education.