Nursing faculty are clinicians at heart. We were trained to notice suffering and respond to it. That instinct doesn’t switch off when we trade a stethoscope for a syllabus. It just gets pointed at a new population, often without the structures that made it sustainable in practice: shift ends, handoffs, a team down the hall. That’s how compassion fatigue settles in.

Maybe your clinical practice is required for accreditation or certification, maybe your institution expects it, or maybe you love patient care too much to give it up. The reason doesn't change the reality that each role has its own pace, its own demands, and its own kind of mental load, and nobody hands you a transition plan for moving between them.

A 2022 article published in Medical Education Online titled "When Students' Words Hurt: 12 Tips for Helping Faculty Receive and Respond Constructively to Student Evaluations of Teaching" by Cornes and colleagues offers evidence-based guidance for exactly this moment. I'm breaking down their key recommendations here through the lens of NP faculty life, because this research is too good not to keep sharing.