Transformative Partnership: Creating an Inter-Professional Environment

Novice and experienced nursing faculty often find it challenging to balance and fulfill the academic tripartite mission of teaching, service and scholarship while staying clinically relevant. Faculty members who excel at teaching and service may struggle to find the time to engage in scholarship. Additionally, the movement to the practice doctorate as the terminal degree for advanced practice nurses poses yet another challenge for faculty members who have not been educated as nurse scientists. Scholarly contributions, however, are essential to academic life, nursing practice, and the continuous evolution of the nursing profession. Boyer’s seminal work on scholarship broadened the view of how faculty members fulfill their roles. Faculty promotion policies and processes are evolving, but may still conflict with this expanded view. As a result, there is a need for both nursing faculty and educational leadership to embrace creative approaches to faculty scholarship. A disruptive innovation may help create a new way of approaching research and scholarship that will eventually displace the traditional approaches.

The traditional singular approach to nursing scholarship has appropriately had a focus on nursing’s impact on a particular research problem. More recently, a team approach to science and scholarship has emerged. This approach encompasses multiple ways of knowing and encourages collaboration by multiple disciplines. It recognizes that the problems faced by consumers of healthcare are often too complex for any one discipline to solve. Bringing scientists and practice experts from different perspectives together fosters teamwork, alleviates the burden of one discipline trying to solve a problem, and supports both faculty and practitioner development. This presentation provides participants with a series of strategies used by a College of Nursing and Health Sciences at a private liberal arts university that has helped foster the implementation of  collaborative scholarship projects. The faculty and administration have come to recognize that the interconnection between our disciplines is significant and should be used to change our educational approach from a paradigm of dominance to a paradigm of partnership.