Guest Editorial: Reconnecting education and service: Partnering for success

In this special issue of Nursing Outlook, we have collected a set of papers that addresses the longstanding and critically important topic of educationservice partnerships in nursing. The tension in the education-service partnership dates back to nursing’s early history when nursing “training” was offered in the model of an apprenticeship. Student nurses who lived at the hospital “ran” the wards in addition to their devoted 15–20 hours each day to the management of wardbased activities and classroom training, generally within a few steps of the patient-care areas. Not until the recommendations issued in the 1923 Goldmark Report, the document that addressed nursing education reform as the 1910 Flexner Report had addressed medical education reform, did the profession begin to separate the education activities from those of service delivery. And we have struggled with how to reconnect ever since. A closer connection between education-focused and service-focused organizations has been identified as the solution to many of the problems faced by nursing today: ● Better access to clinical training sites is often identified as a major impediment to expanding enrollment in schools of nursing. More systematic approaches to managing the clinical site access, through collaborations between education and service, has produced a 10% increase in sites in Oregon. ● Development of transitional educational programs for new graduates have been identified as one way to increase institutional commitment of new nurses and reduce the high costs of orientation and turnover. Education-service partnerships have collaborated in the development of such programs, which some would argue would not be needed if the curriculum in