Partnership Functioning and Sustainability in Nursing Academic Practice Partnerships: The Mediating Role of Partnership Synergy

Purpose: The United States is presently challenged with numerous high profile issues in health care.  The nursing profession is composed of the greatest number of healthcare providers in the system and has the opportunity to effect extensive change.  Creating and sustaining academic practice partnerships is a method to meet these profound challenges more efficiently; however, nursing partnerships have not been studied.  The purpose of this cross-sectional, descriptive research study is to enhance knowledge about the process by which nursing academic practice partnerships (APP) generate partnership synergy and sustainability.

Methods: The research sample included participants that are involved in established nursing APP in the United States.  The relationships between partnership functioning, synergy and sustainability are illustrated and the mediation of synergy among partnership functioning and sustainability is examined.  Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and path analysis were utilized to address the research questions.  

Results: The research participants describe themselves, their institutions, and their partnerships similar to what is related in the literature.  The short version of the Partnership Self-Assessment Tool (PSAT-S) revealed high Cronbach’s α scores representing good reliability for the tool.  All variables revealed statistically significant relationships amongst the variables (p <.05 or p <.01), except the relationship between non-financial resources and sustainability. Partnership synergy was revealed to partially mediate partnership functioning and sustainability; however, efficiency was the only partnership functioning concept that revealed to be a statistically significant negative predicator of partnership synergy.  

Conclusion: This study serves as foundational research in the area of academic practice partnerships.  The association between the partnership functioning, synergy, and sustainability model and the guiding principles and strategies of academic practice partnerships in relation to the Institute of Medication Future of Nursing recommendations are explicated.  The need for further research is explored.