Grant: Project Grant

The enduring human resource crisis in Canadian nursing urgently needs sustainable recruitment and retention strategies. Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs) have been identified as a critical resource to address this but there are persistent barriers for IENs to achieve professional registration. The Supervised Practice Experience Partnership (SPEP) is a promising strategy providing clinical experiences for IENs to accelerate their workforce integration. SPEP is a partnership between the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO), Ontario Health and CNO approved organizations. Many acute care hospitals have implemented SPEP, however there is no prescription for doing so. Little is known about how the program works and/or if it can be sustained to build capacity in our public health nursing workforce. Our study will identify the real-world conditions under which the SPEP can optimally support IENs to successfully integrate into Ontario's nursing workforce and healthcare system. We will use ethnography, a research methodology rooted in the study of culture and power, to examine SPEP implementation in Ontario academic and community hospitals. The specific study aims are to: (1) characterize how Ontario hospitals have implemented the SPEP in their unique organizational contexts to identify what works, where, and for whom; (2) evaluate the program experiences of IENs, clinical supervisors, interprofessional healthcare team members and key hospital stakeholders; and (3) inform the optimization and sustainability of SPEP implementation and the equitable integration of IENs in the nursing workforce. Data will be collected using longitudinal, in-situ observations in selected hospitals as well as interviews with key informants who are purposively sampled throughout the province. Implementation science frameworks and critical social science theories will guide and inform this study.