The work of the Versant Center for the Advancement of Nursing^®, or Vcan^®, is influenced by one overarching concept: an organization’s capacity to provide quality and safe patient care is driven – at least partially - through the collective and cumulative impact of each individual nurse it develops and retains.  As each individual nurse is developed, integrated and retained within an organization, the result is a cohesive and highly competent professional nursing organization capable of providing consistent, predictable and sustainable safe patient care to a given patient population.

Based on this concept, the Vcan Vision is clear: to create and disseminate new thought and evidence demonstrating the link (directly or indirectly) between improvement of patient outcomes and the improvement of nursing education and training, and development of professional, sustainable nursing organizations.

The Vcan strategy is simple: we sponsor research.  Vcan will collaborate with individuals and organizations to identify, research, and author topics of interest that focus on patient safety, organizational capacity, sustainability, and economic benefit. Vcan is looking to attract talented, research-oriented professionals from nursing service, academics, as well as the greater healthcare-related community. Collaboration with Vcan allows creation of new data with our partners and provides access to the Versant National Data to assist in creating a disciplined research project map, defined methodology, and support in data collection, management, analysis and publication.

In summary, Vcan is designed to:

• Provide professional and organizational development opportunities through research, education, publishing, conferences and other events where nursing and healthcare professionals can engage in a collaborative and disciplined model.
• Increase the capacity of academic and community-based healthcare organizations to conduct and publish research.
• Provide access to 15 years of valid and reliable data from over 20,000 unique users via the Versant National Database as related to identified projects.
• Create a national community of collaborative research and education project teams.
• Direct and support the researcher’s clarification of research question(s) and methodology.
• Assist and collaborate in data identification, collection, management, analysis and presentation.
• Document and showcase to a national audience “thought leadership” and successful solutions to critical nursing care problems through publications, education events and podium presentations.