'Working from the inside': an infrastructure for the continuing development of nurses' professional clinical practice

This paper describes how the nursing executive of a tertiary referral facility revisited their management structures and responsibilities to create a new, sustainable infrastructure that supports research and education at the core of nursing practice and not at the periphery.

Nursing executive and senior management groups are charged with the ultimate responsibility of ensuring the highest possible quality nursing care within their facility. In the current health care climate the aim for best practice conflates with evidence-based practice that can be notoriously difficult to achieve due to the many barriers to integrating research findings into practice.

Research and education activities have been established as fundamental to core business under a simple evidence-based practice model.

The value of a synthesis between the clinical areas with the nursing education and research division has been recognized to better achieve the goal of improved services.