Advancing Doctor of Nursing scholarly project impact: A practice partnership collaborative approach

Doctor of Nursing (DNP) scholarly projects serve as an educational capstone to the practice doctorate in nursing. These projects have the potential to address systems-level challenges, inform organizational inquiries, create solutions, and pilot emerging processes in care. However, poor alignment between the expectations of educational programs and the resources, needs, and priority initiatives of health care systems diminish the DNP scholarly project potential. Academic practice partnerships have shown to be a potential solution. School of Nursing (SON) faculty at a Midwestern university partnered with health care system leaders to collaboratively develop a structured partnership to optimize DNP student scholarly project design, impact, sustainability, efficiency, and dissemination of findings. The partnership included mutual contributions and resulted in high-quality, rigorous, system-level DNP projects that were finished on time, demonstrated sustainability, had decreased resource utilization, and were in alignment with the health care system and SON's initiatives and goals. The process was well received by the DNP students and has fostered the increase of group and legacy DNP projects. Ultimately, the partnership and structured DNP project implementation plan resulted in a mutually beneficial solution for both the SON and health care system.