A successful 17-year academic practice partnership to stimulate nursing research

Academic practice partnerships facilitate a shared focus between practice and academic settings that encourages nursing leadership in both settings to work towards improving patient outcomes, facilitating new knowledge and optimizing the organizational aspects of clinical care. The purpose of this report is to describe a 17-year academic-practice partnership with a focus on research, referred to as the University of Maryland Nursing (UMNursing) Research Program. The goal of the academic research partnerships was to create collaborative research opportunities for faculty at the school of nursing and nursing staff at the academic medical center. Since 2007, 17 academic-partnership research grants were funded by the UMNursing Research Program and half of these pilot studies resulted in submissions to the National Institutes of Health for R21, R01 and center-level grants. A total of 9 manuscripts have been published. Academic-practice partnerships for research, such as the one described in this report, can be an alternative solution to alleviating national funding cuts while continuing to facilitate nursing research and building clinically relevant nursing knowledge. Sustained academic-practice partnerships can enhance nursing research capacity, leverage limited funding, and promote clinically relevant scholarship.