Pros and woes of interdisciplinary collaboration with a national clinical trial

Nursing collaborations with clinical trials provide opportunities to answer important nursing questions, enhance interdisciplinary collaboration, use collected data efficiently, include sophisticated measures, and answer questions that could not be answered by either project alone. To foster interdisciplinary collaboration, the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) issued a funding initiative to link nurse researchers and clinical trial teams. This article describes a successful collaboration between Extremity Constraint-Induced Therapy Evaluation (EXCITE), a multisite, national clinical trial, and Caregiver-EXCITE, a complementary nursing study funded by NINR. EXCITE tested a neurorehabilitative technique to improve upper extremity function in stroke survivors, whereas Caregiver-EXCITE addressed hypotheses about family function, stroke recovery, and caregiver outcomes. This article addresses advantages and challenges of this collaboration and provides illustrations of excellent opportunities that joint ventures offer to advance science. These types of collaborations have the potential to profoundly move nursing's research agenda forward.