Supporting professional practice transition in undergraduate nursing education: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: This scoping review will describe educational programming that supports undergraduate student nurses' transition-to-practice and/or enhances practice readiness.

Introduction: The period of transition from nursing student to professional nurse is fraught with challenges stemming from the evolving role and the increasing demands of independent practice. While transition-to-practice programming exists for the new graduate nurse, there is less focus on preparing the student in their final year of education. A scoping review will identify educational programming delivered to nursing students approaching graduation that facilitate transition-to-practice success and/or improve practice readiness.

Inclusion criteria: This review will consider literature describing educational programming that supports transition-to-practice success and/or practice readiness and that demonstrates evidence of evaluation. Studies that involve primarily pre-licensure, undergraduate, or baccalaureate nursing students will be included. Reports of primary studies, reviews, dissertations and theses, conference proceedings, and nursing trade publications that describe quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods will be included.

Methods: The proposed review will adhere to the JBI methodology for scoping reviews. A comprehensive search will be conducted in CINAHL (EBSCOhost), MEDLINE (Ovid), Healthstar (Ovid), and Nursing and Allied Health (ProQuest) using a search strategy developed in consultation with an expert university librarian. Two independent reviewers will screen articles by title and abstract and assess the full text of each selected citation against inclusion criteria. Quantitative methods (descriptive statistics) and basic qualitative content analysis will be used to analyze the data, and results will be reported in narrative and graphic formats.

Review registration: Open Science Framework osf.io/2vsbq.