Outcomes of an Innovative Best Practice Clinical Immersion Framework.

Background: Academic nursing has a long history of partnering with practice-based settings to provide clinical learning experiences for nursing students; however, these placements are not easily obtained, especially in pediatrics. Approach: A freestanding academic pediatric hospital and 3 academic nursing programs collaborated to provide clinical practice to nursing students hired in a practice-based internship program. A second aim was to pilot a best practice clinical immersion framework to provide academic credit to bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) students using a shared clinical syllabus and e-learning platform. Outcomes: Sixteen nursing students successfully completed the program; 11 (68.7%) completed the pre- and postevaluation with significant (P <.05) changes in scores for 7 of the 20 questions. Conclusion: This best practice clinical immersion framework provided a strategy for obtaining clinical practice and academic credit, demonstrating the potential of innovative practice-academic partnerships. Further, this framework can be easily adapted in other practice-academic partnerships in all clinical areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]