Commentary: Shared purpose, shared future—strengthening aged care through academic collaboration

Commentary to: Partnerships to prepare undergraduate nursing students to care for older adults in residential aged care: a scoping review (Naswari et al., 2025).

In this issue of the Journal of Research in Nursing, the scoping review ‘Partnerships to prepare undergraduate nursing students to care for older adults’ by Naswari et al. (2025) provides important pedagogical direction for strengthening nursing students’ clinical placements in residential aged care. As the global population ages, nursing programmes everywhere are struggling to ensure that clinical placements offer meaningful preparation for caring for older adults (World Health Organization, 2025). As the authors of the review note, significant partnerships have been developed in recent years between academic institutions and aged care organisations. Despite these efforts, many placements still fall short of their intended goals and often lack the structure, supervision and mentorship required to support deep and transformative student learning (Boscart et al., 2022; Hyun et al., 2024; Laugaland et al., 2021). Students often complete their placements lacking confidence in caring for older adults and with a limited understanding of the Registered Nurse’s (RN’s) role in aged care (Allué-Sierra et al., 2023; Keeping-Burke et al., 2020).

The review highlights diverse strategies used to enhance the quality of clinical placements in aged care settings, with a central focus on the importance of educational partnerships between nursing education programmes and care organisations. The findings suggest that better preparing future nurses to care for older adults requires more than curricular revisions or the use of residential aged care facilities as clinical placement sites. Instead, intentional, co-designed educational interventions developed in partnership with aged care providers are key to reshaping how students experience caring for older adults. These partnerships can not only foster interest in aged care as a career path but also offer nursing programmes practical guidance in designing meaningful, high-impact clinical experiences.

As the authors rightly point out, partnerships focused on improving student learning in aged care must be carefully planned with context-specific considerations. Aged care placements vary widely in terms of settings, staffing models and available resources. A consistent challenge is the limited visibility of the RN’s role within these environments (Laugaland et al., 2021). It is well documented that students often spend the majority of their time working alongside unregulated care workers, with minimal exposure to, or interaction with RNs (Keeping-Burke et al., 2020). Consequently, students may leave the placement with misunderstandings of the RN’s responsibilities. As noted by Himanen and Salpin (2024), this lack of clarity can lead to disengagement from the aged care sector and a failure to see its value and potential as a career pathway. Strong partnerships between nursing education programmes and clinical sites are essential in supporting students to develop an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the RN’s scope of practice. Intentional strategies such as co-developed placements, targeted preceptor education, and expanded opportunities across programmes can help prevent scope slip.

Scope slip occurs when the RNs’ responsibilities are informally transferred to other care providers, including licensed practical nurses or unregulated care providers (Stephenson, 2021). For students, scope slip may begin when they observe RNs engaging in routine tasks without a contextual understanding of how these activities fall within the RN’s broader responsibilities of leadership and oversight. In the absence of adequate guidance, students may conflate the RN’s role with other care roles, resulting in a misinformed understanding of nursing in aged care as lacking in clinical complexity and decision-making responsibility. A concerning cycle can emerge when students do not witness the full scope and impact of the RN’s role during clinical placements. When the RN’s contributions are invisible or poorly articulated, students may carry a narrow and inaccurate view of nursing practice into their professional roles. This can perpetuate a limited enactment of the RN’s role in aged care settings. Over time, this constrains professional growth and leadership and impacts residents, organisations, and broader health and aged care systems.

As the scoping review powerfully illustrates, strong, sustained partnerships between nursing programmes and aged care providers represent a critical opportunity to interrupt this cycle. These collaborations can help reshape student experiences, clarify the role and potential of RNs in aged care and ultimately contribute to a more engaged, prepared, and visionary nursing workforce. Although recommendations lie beyond the reach of a scoping review, this review provides a valuable foundation for strengthening educational partnerships in aged care. If acted upon, the insights from this review could serve as a catalyst for transformative change in how nursing students learn and in how aged care is valued, delivered and led. The future of aged care depends, in part, on how effectively we educate and inspire the next generation of nurses to see aged care as a critical, complex, and rewarding area of professional practice.

Biography

Patirica Morris is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing & Health Sciences, University of New Brunswick. She serves as a lead for the university’s Summer Aging Institute, which aims to transform nursing education in the context of long-term care. Her research focuses on ageing, with a particular emphasis on reimagining dementia through the lens of neurodiversity.

Rose McCloskey is a Professor in the Faculty of Nursing & Health Sciences, University of New Brunswick. She serves as Director of the university’s Long-Term Care Research Simulation Lab and Deputy Convenor of the JBI Nursing Research Center for Systematic Reviews. Her research focuses on healthcare transitions, long-term care and nursing education.

Ali McGill is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing & Health Sciences, University of New Brunswick. She holds the Joan Kingston Research Chair and serves as Director of the university’s Health Systems Lab. Her research takes a systems-based approach to examining complex healthcare processes, with a focus on identifying inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.