Jointly Appointed Nurse Scientists: Bridging the Gap Between Academic and Practice Settings

As described in the 2016 American Association of Colleges of Nursing report, “Advancing Healthcare Transformation: A New Era for Academic Nursing,” integrating nursing research into the practice environment is critical for improving patient care and advancing nursing science. To work towards this goal, our school of nursing began a partnership program with hospitals in our geographic area to hire PhD-prepared nurse scientists who are jointly appointed in the academic and clinical setting.

The program began in 2014 with the hiring of a single nurse scientist who was jointly appointed in the school of nursing and a local healthcare network that includes several acute care hospitals, community hospitals, and a network of outpatient facilities. Two additional nurse scientists were added to that partnership in 2015 and 2016. Beginning in 2017, the program expanded to include a second large hospital network, an independent orthopedic hospital, and an independent cancer hospital, with one new nurse scientist hired in a jointly appointed role for each of these facilities.

The major activities of the partnership programs vary to meet the needs of each hospital. Core functions of the program include providing direct support to clinical nurses who are engaged in research and scholarship, and providing didactic training to foster inquiry and develop skills for conducting research and translating evidence into practice. Supportive activities for research include mentoring nurses through the development of a research question, designing a study, writing a proposal, securing grant funding, obtaining institutional review board approval, collecting and analyzing data, and scholarly writing and dissemination. In addition, as part of the partnership, the school of nursing provides access to biostatisticians and healthcare reference librarians for nurses at the partnering hospitals. Didactic training takes many forms ranging from unit-level presentations to nurses on conducting translational research, or specific topics requested by nurses, to formal nursing research fellowship programs lasting one to two years.

To evaluate the success of the program, we examine a variety of metrics including the numbers of IRB approved research studies, conference abstracts, policy articles, and peer-reviewed research articles written by clinical nurses at the partnering hospitals; the number of research grants submitted and funded through partnerships between the academic and clinical environments; visibility and interest in nursing research among staff and administrators at the partnering hospitals; and impact on patient outcomes after practice changes resulting from translational research.