Use of a Systematic Consultation Process to Facilitate Nursing Research Projects: An Exemplar

The purpose of this article is to describe the use of a well-established, 5-stage consultation process, to advise a research team on planning strategies to engage domestic violence shelters (DVSs) as community partners in their study. The research team is testing a health promotion intervention for teens living in shelters with their parent and needed to enlist shelters as sites to recruit teens and conduct the intervention. Consultation aims were to (a) identify highly promising strategies described in peer-reviewed literature for identifying, recruiting, and collaborating with community organizations in research and (b) identify DVSs that would potentially serve as effective community partners for the study.

A clinical nurse specialist and a public health master's degree student led the consultation. The consultation process included (a) a systematic review of 29 peer-reviewed articles about research or program evaluation studies that engaged community partners and (b) a comprehensive online search of information about DVSs.

Consultants identified 104 strategies used in studies to engage community partners and 10 specific DVSs most likely to effectively engage in the study.

Clinical nurse specialists are well situated to provide consultation to research teams and should follow well-established consultation processes and systematic data collection procedures.