In Their Own Words

No Dual Track for Nurses Hurts Patients, Penn LDI Expert Says

Nurse-Scientist Pathways Would Speed Evidence Into Practice, Says Nursing’s Kathryn Connell

July 13, 2026

By:

Kathryn Connell PhD, RN

Print:

Two women in medical scrubs studying in a university library.

This Correspondence originally appeared in Volume 408, Issue 10549 of The Lancet.

As a nurse clinician–scientist^1,2 who maintains active clinical practice alongside a research programme, I argue that nursing is a profession in which dual expertise is pervasive yet structurally invisible. Barriers to the recognition and integration of lived experience in psychiatry were raised by Tania Gergel in a Comment,³ and these concerns resonate powerfully with the nursing profession.

Nurses constitute the largest segment of the health-care workforce, and many enter the profession, or gravitate towards specialties, because of personal encounters with illness, caregiving, or health-system failure. In mental health settings especially, the prevalence of lived experience among nursing staff is likely substantial. Yet nursing faces an additional layer of the binary that Gergel describes; nurses are positioned as caregivers rather than knowledge producers, making the integration of any form of expertise, whether from lived experience or research, doubly difficult to achieve.

The structural barriers to clinician–scientist roles in nursing are well documented. Nurse clinician–scientists who wish to sustain both research and bedside practice often do so through unsustainable arrangements, working clinical shifts at nights and weekends alongside full-time academic appointments, because formal hybrid roles remain the exception.⁴ Although physician–scientists benefit from established infrastructure supporting dual clinical–research careers, comparable pathways for nurses are scarce. Nurse clinician–scientists who also have lived experience face compounding forms of the same tension Gergel describes, with disclosure risking perceptions of both professional competence and scholarly credibility.

Read the full Correspondence here.

References

Connell, Kathryn, Hyunmin Yu, Mollie Hobensack, and Eleanor Turi. “Is the Nursing PhD in Terminal Decline? The Case for Clinician-Scientist Pathways.” Nursing Outlook 74, no. 1 (January 2026): 102596. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2025.102596.
‌Riman, Kathryn A, Andrew M Dierkes, and Allison A Norful. 2024. “Integrating Clinical and Academic Nursing: The Role of Clinician-Scientists.” Journal of Professional Nursing 51 (February): A1–2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2024.02.001.
Gergel, Tania. “Lived Experience Research: Recognition of Dual Expertise.” The Lancet Psychiatry 0, no. 0 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(26)00057-X.
Hobensack, Mollie, Eleanor Turi, and Julie Sochalski. “Benefits of Dual Appointments in Academic Research and Bedside Nursing.” AJN, American Journal of Nursing 124, no. 11 (October 24, 2024): 8–8. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.naj.0001081660.66123.e6.