Research Grants Awarded to Study Nurse Residency Programs, Scope of Practice, Primary Care Workforce

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and INQRI today announced the recipients of four new grants from the Future of Nursing National Research Agenda. The grants will support research into key issues being addressed by the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action: nursing education and scope of practice regulations.

A fifth study funded last year, to determine the how emerging models of primary care will affect future primary care workforce needs, is nearing completion.That study was co-funded by the Donaghue Foundation. It's being conducted by David Auerbach of the RAND Corporation.

The other four studies are:

• A team from the University of Pennsylvania will examine the impact of the provision of the Prescription for Pennsylvania law that removed practice barriers for APRNs. The research team will evaluate the development and architecture of the bill, and the success of the provision in expanding access to health care, particularly in medically underserved communities.
  

• A team from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will evaluate the effect of state regulations on APRN and physician teamwork, collaboration, and patient outcomes. They will compare six states with the most restrictive regulations on APRN practice with the 10 states that have the least restrictive regulations.  
• A team from the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston will examine whether loosening state restrictions on scope of practice for nurse practitioners affects cost; quality or access to care; brings more nurse practitioners into the state; and the role organizations play in interpreting regulations.  
• A team from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will evaluate the University HealthSystem Consortium/American Association of Colleges of Nursing Nurse Residency Program (NRP) to determine whether these programs provide a return on investment and to which entities. The NRP is the largest and only baccalaureate degree, graduate–focused, standardized residency program in the U.S.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) created the Future of Nursing National Research Agenda in 2012 to support research that would inform implementation of the recommendations in the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) groundbreaking report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. The project is coordinated by RWJF’s Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI).