Mind the Gap: Fostering Scholarship-into-Practice for Advanced Practice Nursing Students through Embedded Librarianship

Abstract

In recent years, librarianship has been increasingly recognized as a critical component of
inter-professional healthcare education. This manuscript describes how innovative
coordination between libraries and university healthcare programs can remove the barriers to
scholarship for graduate students who enroll in distance education (DE) programs. The
authors examined the perceived impact of librarian embedment for DE nursing students
graduating with master’s degrees from George Washington University in 2013. Librarians
were embedded in the first course in which they were enrolled in 2010 to support the mastery
of scientific research skills. Analysis indicated that students strongly agreed that contact with
embedded librarians in DE courses at the onset of a graduate school, improved their ability to
engage in scholarly activities throughout their program of study. It also facilitated the
integration of scholarship into practice (required for school accreditation) by allowing them
to expeditiously retrieve research from databases and generate evidence for patient care
delivery.