Clinical Nurse Educators-RN Ratio

NCLEX Columnist · Sep 12, 2020

On 9/6/2020 at 7:49 AM, lunate said:

Hi everyone

do you happen to have any EBP/experience recommendations on the optimal ratio of CNEs-RN.

I have searched the literature, but the literature in this area is very scarce.

I appreciate your support and assistance!

thanks a lot

I can see why this is a complicated statistic to find - it's because there isn't any good data out there that provides recommendations for this. Perhaps it's a great way to start the process of determining what the optimal ratio should be.

In my experience, most healthcare facilities have their CNEs assigned to several units (expecting to cover the onboarding/training/inservicing/competencies, etc. for all of the Nurses, and Nursing Assistant staff. I am lucky to have worked for a facility that had an educator for each unit. (Which is not very common since administration like to stretch nurses as thin as possible - especially when we are not direct patient care).

If I were to begin thinking about how to quantify this, I would look at what the current numbers are (on average across setting types) and then look at a variety of factors to determine if the current average is sufficient to meet the professional development needs of the nurses, as well as the requirements of the position. I find that we sacrifice a lot of high-quality education to appease the facility by doing administrative work, etc.

That could be a very nice project.