Background: Academic-clinical partnerships offer opportunities to promote evidence-based healthcare in clinical and educational settings. An integrated approach, with the active collaboration of all stakeholders (researchers, healthcare professionals, and final consumers), becomes essential to prioritize the needs of evidence, to develop primary and secondary research regarding specific knowledge needs, and to transfer and implement the best available evidence in clinical practice. Objective: To describe the initiatives developed regarding the partnership between a clinical and a higher education nursing institution in Portugal.
Methods: Within the JBI Collaboration, a partnership between a nursing school and a university hospital in Portugal was established in 2021. This academic-clinical partnership was created to promote the use of the best available evidence in healthcare decisions by healthcare professionals (clinicians and managers) and, consequently, to achieve the best outcomes for citizens; maximize resources and synergies; and allow the selection of topics for primary and secondary research.
Results: Within this partnership, two webinars and one symposium were organized in 2021. Webinar 1 (“Evidence-based Healthcare – JBI’s Model” and “Academic-Clinic Partnership as a Pillar for Evidence Transfer”) had 78 participants. Webinar 2 (“Evidence-based Healthcare Day: All for one – Evidence, Professional Experience, Patient and Context”) had 50 participants. The face-to-face symposium “Evidence-Informed Healthcare: Better decisions, better results” had more than 100 participants. Additionally, three oral communications (“Evidence Implementation,” “Rapid Science,” and “Systematic Literature Review”) and one workshop (“Meta-analysis Interpretation”) were provided at one symposium conducted by the clinical partner in 2022. Moreover, 12 implementation projects were conducted in collaboration with the clinical partner, of which 3 were already published in a scientific journal.
Conclusions: This academic-clinical partnership helped increase the awareness of healthcare professionals about evidence-based healthcare, as can be confirmed by the improvement in the number of implementation projects in collaboration. Nevertheless, more efforts are needed to create new opportunities, especially concerning the selection of topics for primary and secondary research as well as for the development of implementation projects through an active collaboration between researchers and final consumers (healthcare professionals and patients).