A State-University Collaboration to Improve State Hospital Nursing Care

Study of both the failures and the successes of the collaboration has revealed that the most effective activities have been those that help individual nurses surmount barriers to their professional development. The barriers include those created by different work shifts, entrenched status differences, real and imagined restrictions on nurses' behavior, and invidious public stereotypes about their place of work and the patients they treat.

Analysis of program components has indicated that their most important effect has been to facilitate nurses' interaction with each other and with faculty members, clinical specialists, nurses in other hospitals, hospital directors and supenintendents, graduate students, and a wide variety of other professional groups. This social intercourse has been the most potent tool of change for the state hospital nurses participating in the collaboration. The new and challenging experiences offered by the program have stimulated the nurses' intellect, sense of adventure, and selfconfidence. Their heightened joic de vivre and increasing tendency to see their specialty as exciting have been highly important, albeit serendipitous, results of the collaboration.