Mind the gap: Fostering scholarship-into-practice for advanced practice nursing students through embedded librarianship

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.