Structural Empowerment to Achieve Clinical Research Nurse Integration Within Academic Medical Centers

Clinical research nurses (CRNs) advance evidence-based care and biomedical science. Despite their primacy within research teams, integration of this newly recognized specialty is an opportunity not fully realized. This article describes practical pathways based on structural empowerment models (SEMs) to optimize the integration of CRN expertise within the research and nursing ecosystem. The components of SEM were applied to describe, analyze, and compare the models, yielding examples that can be translated to other practice settings.