Tool enables nurse leaders to improve academic-practice partnerships

AONL member Lindell Joseph, PhD, RN, and co-authors discuss their diagnostic tool to measure the conditions enabling health care innovation in academic-practice partnerships. Joseph, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Nursing, and her co-authors explain in the May issue of the Journal of Nursing Administration how nursing leaders in academia and practice need a common language and shared model for understanding and planning academic-practice partnerships to promote innovation. Nursing leaders can use the scale, consisting of 98 items, to take advantage of each other’s assets to innovate. They also can use the scale to identify potential constraints to innovation and strive to eliminate them. The researchers developed the scale using data from five U.S. academic-practice partnership sites.