Sammanfattning
Ongoing rapid development in the delivery of health care, new and complex disease patterns, increasing complexity of patient situations, changes in treatment and work structures, increasing need for collaboration and complex problem solving are some of the factors requiring nurses to develop their professional expertise. Ideas of what constitutes nursing competence and how such competence is taught and learned are evolving. Consequently, nurse teachers’ competencies to provide high-quality, up-to-date nursing education are developing accordingly. This development is influenced by the increased emphasis on academization. This paper reviews existing research on the role of academic competence in nurse teachers’ professional practice. A rigorous search, retrieval, and appraisal process identified 26 studies for inclusion in the review. A thematic synthesis was applied. The results pointed to three main dimensions of the role of nurse teachers’ academic competencies in their professional practice. The first dimension was related to developing and sustaining research collaborations with the health care sector. The second dimension included research that informs teaching/using research on instruction, enables productive decisions about educational activities, and provides opportunities for student learning. The third dimension pointed to research-based teaching in the sense that this is most often understood as using one’s own research. These dimensions appeared to be influenced by structural changes in nursing education that follows from fusions between small education campuses into universities. We particularly find that the relational and spatial dimensions with these structural changes influence nurse teachers experience of their work. We argue that it is important to address issues of how nurse teachers’ academic competence influences different aspects of their work. Unless, the quality enhancement in nursing education and nurse teachers’ professional practice remain fragmented and elusive.