Draft:Nurse+Engineer

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A nurse-engineer (also styled nurse engineer, nurse–engineer, or Nurse+Engineer) is a nursing specialty that integrates the disciplines of nursing and engineering in clinical practice, healthcare-technology design, public-health, and planetary health systems work. The term refers both to individuals who hold credentials in both fields and to team-based collaborations in which nurses and engineers jointly design clinical technologies, healthcare systems, and population-health interventions through convergence research.¹² Discussion of the relationship between nursing and engineering in the indexed nursing literature dates to a 1963 editorial in Nursing Research.³ The role has been formalized through dual-degree academic programs, named research centers, U.S. National Science Foundation–funded research investment, and a peer-reviewed scoping literature on nursing-engineering collaboration.⁴⁵

The earliest indexed reference to the relationship between the two professions in the nursing literature is a 1963 editorial in Nursing Research titled "The Nurse and the Engineer".³ Sustained theoretical engagement with the boundary between the disciplines emerged in nursing scholarship in the early 2000s, notably with Rozzano Locsin's Technological Competency as Caring in Nursing: A Model for Practice (2005), which articulated a framework for integrating engineered technologies into nursing practice.⁶ Modern programmatic development began in the mid-2010s. William Eisenhauer, writing in Industrial Engineer in 2015, called for the establishment of nursing engineering as an academic discipline and identified an emerging need for cross-trained professionals.⁷ Glasgow, Colbert, Viator, and Cavanagh (2018), writing in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, described two early biomedical engineering and nursing collaborations and articulated the case for a new "nurse-engineer" professional role.¹ Zhou, Li, and Li (2021) published a scoping review in the International Journal of Nursing Studies synthesizing the field's literature and identifying interprofessional education and platform development as priorities.⁴

Formal academic infrastructure for nurse-engineer education developed primarily in the 2010s and 2020s. Duquesne University launched a five-year joint program leading to both a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering in the mid-2010s, the first such undergraduate dual-degree program in the United States.¹⁵ Florida Atlantic University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Connecticut have since developed dual-degree programs, graduate fellowships, or joint research centers.⁵ Research-center infrastructure includes the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, established in 2021,⁸ and the SHINE (Strengthening Healthcare Innovation through Nursing and Engineering) project at the same institution, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2025 at $3 million as a convergence-research investment in the field.⁹

Several frameworks have been advanced in the peer-reviewed literature for nurse-engineer collaboration. Locsin's Technological Competency as Caring in Nursing (2005) provides a nursing-theoretical framework for integrating engineered systems into clinical practice while preserving caring as the discipline's organizing principle.⁶ Glasgow and colleagues (2018) characterized the nurse-engineer as a new professional role designed to address gaps in nurse-technology interface and patient care device innovation.¹ Oerther and Glasgow (2022), writing in Nursing Outlook, proposed the "V-shaped professional" framework, characterizing nurse-engineer practitioners as holding two disciplinary depths that converge at a shared practice surface.² Sguanci and colleagues (2024), in MethodsX, published a methodological synthesis of nursing-engineering interdisciplinary research approaches.¹⁰

Research outputs from nurse-engineer teams span clinical-device design, public-health technology, and healthcare-systems engineering. The American Journal of Nursing published a four-part "Nurse Innovators" column series by Giuliano and Landsman from 2022 to 2023 surveying nurse-engineer partnerships, collaborative product innovation, and academic models for cross-disciplinary training.⁸¹¹ A 2024 ONS Voice case study by oncology advanced-practice nurse Jan Tipton described participation in a nurse-engineer team developing a trauma-informed self-sampling device for cervical cancer screening among unhoused populations.¹² Nurse-engineer collaboration in academic and industry hackathons has been documented in the peer-reviewed nursing literature as an emerging modality of interdisciplinary practice. Risling and Risling (2021), writing in the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, identified the NurseHack4Health initiative — launched in 2019 by the Society of Nurse Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs, and Leaders in partnership with Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft — as a foundational instance of nurse-led hackathons.¹³ Marsack and colleagues (2024), reporting on the University of Michigan's Innovate 4 Change hackathon in Nursing Outlook, named additional institutional examples including the D'Youville Healthcare Hackathon, the UCLA Health Innovation Challenge, the Vanderbilt Mental Health Innovation Challenge and Hackathon, and the Northeastern University Nursing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit and Hackathon.¹⁴

The term is rendered variously in the literature. Nurse-engineer (with a hyphen) is a common form in peer-reviewed nursing scholarship.¹⁴⁸ Nurse engineer (unhyphenated) appears in earlier industrial-engineering writing.⁷ Nurse–engineer (with an en-dash) is used in editorial publications of professional societies including the Oncology Nursing Society.¹² Nurse+Engineer (with a plus sign) is associated with a body of recent work on the V-shaped professional framework.² Nursing-engineering is preferred in some methodological literature.¹⁰ No single terminological variant has consensus standing across both nursing and engineering literatures.