Using research to shape health policy.

Nursing science and research findings are powerful ingredients in influencing health care policy makers. Policy must be influenced on several levels: practice, the environment of practice, and public policy. Nursing has successful examples of the benefits of such efforts. Doctoral students, as the future nurse scientists of our discipline, must be socialized to value and understand the process of using the profession's research base to affect health care policy at numerous levels. Nursing knowledge of these strategies and the theoretical bases undergirding them has only begun to develop. Our challenge is to develop such strategies more systematically based on the growing body of knowledge in health care policy that relates to nursing science and research.