Professional Partnership In Nursing Education
What Is Professional Community Partnership
Professional community partnerships are collaborative relationships between a professional/professional group and a community group/agency working in a reciprocal manner to build on strengths and needs of all parties while addressing joint concerns, issues, or problems. These partner ships involve professionals in health care organizations, education, civic, and service organizations.
Frequently, these partnerships involve academic institutions and community agencies and may also be known as academic practice partnerships, academic service partnerships, education practice partnerships, academic community partnerships, or community campus partnerships.Successful professional community partnerships involve mutual respect, trust. commitment, open and ongoing communication, shared goals and knowledge, and cooperation. Partners have agreed upon missions, values, goals, and measurable outcomes; they build upon individual strengths and assets and share resources.
These professional community partnerships expand opportunities for the partners while maximizing partner potential (American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Association of Nurse Executives, 2010; Beal et al., 2012 Community Campus Partnerships for Health, 2013).
Usefulness of Community Professional Membership In Nursing Education
Professional community partnerships can be a useful approach in addressing educational needs and providing rich learning opportunities for students in various programs and across all levels of nursing education. They may lead to improved access to clinical learning opportunities for students, research initiatives, practice sites for faculty, and enhanced recruitment and employment of graduate nursing students by clinical agencies involved in the partnership.
Professional community partnerships can be established with academic nursing programs, professional organizations, and other community health care providers and agencies such as faith communities; schools; community health centers; hospice; shelters social service agencies, civic, governmental, or health and human service organizations; businesses; or health clinics (Shellenbarger, 2003). As professional-community partner-ships develop, participants must be sensitive to potential barriers such as lack of time, lack of resources, lack of knowledge, mistrust, or impaired communication, and work to establish a relationship that builds on strengths and is mutually beneficial to all parties (Beal & Alt-White, 2012).
History of Nursing Community Membership
Partnerships have been in existence in nursing for hundreds of years, starting with health care collaborations with religious communities, followed later by partnerships with physicians, the government, hospitals, and professional organizations (Beal et al, 2012). With recent changes in health care, coupled with the demand for nurses and nursing education, nursing leaders and other health care providers have explored methods of developing approaches to address these issues and partnerships have emerged.
More than 15 years ago, a national interest in community partnerships emerged out of the Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation initiative as the service learning movement in higher education began to grow. Various health care educators in higher education partnered with communities to address health and social challenges. Leaders in nursing recognized the value of partnerships. In 2010, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) created a joint task force to explore concerns and issues related to academic practice partnerships.
Their work included a review of evidence-based literature, data collection involving a national survey, focus groups with academic and service leaders, developing a road map for leaders to create and sustain effective partnerships, defining the characteristics of these partnerships. and identifying facilitators and barriers of academic practice partnerships (Beal et al., 2012). Their work resulted in guiding principles for academic practice partnerships, which are similar to principles identified in good community campus partnerships that were developed by the Community Campus Partnerships for Health (2013).
Both groups agree that there are key elements in partner-ships that include mutual respect and trust, commitment to the partnership, sharing of knowledge and resources, and the need for evaluation (American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Association of Nurse Executives, 2012 ; Community Campus Partnership for Health, 2013) Additionally, for partnerships to be effective, involved partners must have agreed upon values, goals, and objectives, and use open and clear communication (Beal et al, 2012; Plowfield, Wheeler, & Raymond, 2005).
Successful of Professional Community Partnership
As professional community partnerships continue to expand, faculty need further information to ensure successful outcomes of these partnerships. Since much of the literature and research about community partnerships is anecdotal or single site reports, research is needed to understand how to establish, sustain, and evaluate effective partnership activities. Research should use rigorous methods, valid and reliable tools, and sampling approaches with adequate sample sizes that allow generalization.
A variety of implementation issues should also be considered for faculty interested in pursuing professional community partnerships. First, faculty need to assess educational and community needs to determine unmet problems and issues that could be best addressed through partnership activities. Then, identification of potential partners is needed. As partnership relationships are developed, time, funding, knowledge, and resources are required to ensure success.
Recommended guiding principles concerning partnerships should be followed. Lastly, partners need to plan evaluation activities to determine outcomes of the partnership and impact on key stakeholders. Additional research is needed to ensure that principles of partnerships are effective and used properly. The literature suggests multiple benefits to professional-community partnerships but further research is needed.
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