Creating an education and research consortium. Framework and development

Today's schools of nursing and clinical organizations providing nursing care need to synchronize their efforts to maximize one another's achievements. This article describes how complementary goals of two or more organizations can be achieved through mutual efforts, and briefly details the process of consortium development and the role of leaders in this process. Interorganizational collaboration examples are discussed at two institutions in two different regions of the country, and the authors offer a number of ways that nursing education and practice can work together to meet their overlapping needs, attack the nursing shortage, and move nursing education and practice toward evidence-based care.