Clinical nurse leaders in the community: Building an academic faculty practice partnership

Abstract

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) emphasis on preventive care and primary health has given community organizations and outpatient care environments renewed attention. Nursing has been offered the opportunity to lead healthcare into a new era. One of the two new nursing programs to be given life in this movement is the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL). The CNL is a graduate level educated nurse who specializes in healthcare systems leadership, a facilitator of care in the complex healthcare environments of today. They are equipped to see the wider and broader perspective of things, assess needs, research the best interventions for problems identified, implement these interventions, and evaluate the processes and outcomes of the interventions.  This paper describes the experience of a school of nursing and health professions and a community non-profit organization in developing a community faculty practice partnership allowing for CNL, nurse practitioner, and Doctorate of Psychology students to be placed at a community clinic serving high-risk patients. The Synergy Model of community partnership formation by Lasker and Weiss is used as the complimentary model to show how the CNL approach to a microsystem can be effectively adopted into the community setting with beneficial outcomes to both parties of the partnership.