Study Background & Rationale:
Canada’s nursing workforce is in crisis due to critical staff shortages and challenges surrounding recruitment and retention. Urgent national calls demand action to improve health system quality and capacity as we move forward from COVID-19. British Columbia (BC) is no exception to these challenges, and health service leaders aim to address these issues in innovative and informed ways. BC’s Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) has recently created an initiative to strengthen advanced practice nursing with the goal of developing a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) strategy across the province’s specialized health services. CNSs are advanced practice nurses with graduate training and specialized expertise who lead clinical care, system changes, and advancement of nursing practice. As part of its strategic plan, PHSA is creating a novel CNS Program at BC Cancer, which entails the implementation and evaluation of new CNS roles across all 6 regional centres. This has led to a unique policy opportunity to collaboratively support evidence-informed system transformation in real time.
The purpose of this research is to develop clear, actionable, and evidence-based policy to shape nursing workforce transformation and practice-ready policy recommendations to establish a provincial CNS strategy for PHSA and implementation roadmap for BC Cancer. We will accomplish this through 3 phases.
Phase 1:
We will generate evidence on how to best support, retain, and evaluate CNSs through an environmental scan of current policy, a provincial CNS workforce survey, and key informant interviews.
Phase 2:
We will develop policy recommendations and actionable strategies that can guide a CNS workforce strategy for PHSA through a Policy Setting Workshop with key PHSA partners.
Phase 3:
We will create a detailed roadmap for implementing, sustaining, and evaluating the CNS role across BC Cancer through a Policy Implementation Workshop with key BC Cancer partners.
Study Team
Outputs from this research hold the potential to substantially impact policy, programs, and practices for CNSs at the provincial, national, and possibly international level.
This project is funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research (FRN: PO6 187052) and is being conducted in collaboration with the University of British Columbia School of Nursing.
If you are interested in participating in this work, or would like to learn more, please contact the research team at research.kt@bccancer.bc.ca.