Integrating clinical quality improvement strategies with nursing research

Bridging the research-practice gap has been a focus of concern for nursing and other health care disciplines. The challenge in linking research and practice is for practitioners to use consistently the best available evidence in their clinical practice and for researchers to engage in clinically relevant research that provides practitioners with the evidence to do so. The authors of this article advocate that blending Clinical Quality Improvement (CQI) strategies with research methodology is a means of bridging the research-practice gap. The process of blending CQI strategies and nursing research is described in this article.