| Learning Objective #1: Identify benefits and challenges of collaborating with a national clinical trial | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Describe strategies to successfully implement multi-site studies with interdisciplinary teams |
Objective: In 2000 the National Institute of Nursing Research released a request for applications to specifically foster collaborative research between nurse researchers and non-nurse researchers with existing, experimental, clinical trials. The primary purpose of this visionary proposal was to facilitate research linkages with the numerous, National Institutes of Health’s funded clinical trials in which complementary nursing studies would maximize the time, energy, and resources already expended for research. These clinical trials are often multi-site and have large sample sizes that enhance recruitment of minorities. Clinical trial data often include variables essential to answer nursing questions. More important is the opportunity to develop long-term collaborations between research teams, expand the expertise of each team, and lead to future joint research ventures.
Design: This paper describes a successful, funded proposal, a complementary nursing study conducted in collaboration with the Extremity Constraint-Induced Therapy Evaluation (EXCITE), a multi-site, national clinical trial. EXCITE is designed to test a neurorehabilitative technique to improve function in the upper extremity of stroke survivors and the complementary nursing study addresses important hypotheses about family function, stroke recovery, and caregiver outcomes. The advantages and the challenges encountered from proposal development through implementation will be discussed.
Conclusions/Implications: Nursing research collaborations with clinical trials provide excellent ways to answer crucial nursing questions, enhance interdisciplinary collaborations, use collected data efficiently, and answer questions that could not be answered with either project alone. Nurse researchers need to actively seek opportunities to collaborate with ongoing national clinical trials to examine important nursing questions cost effectively and expand their interdisciplinary research linkages. In collaborating with EXCITE, the nursing research team was enhanced with a broad array of expertise and sophisticated measures of stroke survivor function. These types of collaborations have the potential to make a quantum leap in moving nursing’s research agenda forward.
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