Nursing Academic-Practice Partnership: The Effectiveness of Implementing an Early Residency Program for Nursing Students

The purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative academic-service partnership aimed at offering appropriate support to new graduate registered nurses (RNs) to facilitate their transition into practice. The partnership is between an integrated health care system based in southwest Ohio (Premier Health [PH]), a university setting (College of Nursing and Health, Wright State University-Miami Valley), and a national provider of nursing residency for new graduate nurses (Versant Holdings, LLC). The partnership offers insights on how to align both academic and service expectations related to the clinical competencies of new graduate RNs. In addition to decreasing the gap between academia and service expectations, the residency program offered a 2% decrease in turnover of new graduate RNs within 1 year, resulting in an estimated $600,000 of annualized cost avoidance.