Nursing students’ academic engagement and retention challenges: nurse educator’s perspective

In recent years, in the UK, nursing students’ poor academic engagement and high attrition rates have raised serious concerns around academic failure, professionalism, and wastage of resources. We have witnessed nurse educator colleagues becoming increasingly concerned and frustrated due to poor attendance of students in teaching sessions. This seems to be one of the major and ongoing issues, not only in the UK’s nursing education sector but in many rich countries (Mooring 2016; Farahani et al. 2017). For example, the UK, Canada, USA, have exceptionally high nursing student attrition rates (Mooring 2016). Realising the situation, nurse educators are exploring strategies to address this (Bosun-Arije and Dolan 2024; Sabin et al. 2012).