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Issued by

National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR)

Purpose

The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) is updating its Strategic Plan, which will guide NINR’s research efforts and priorities over the next five years. This Notice is a Request for Information (RFI) inviting public feedback on the draft framework of the NINR 2022-2026 Strategic Plan.

Please note that it is important to read the entire RFI to fully understand how your comments will be utilized and to help you prepare a constructive response.

Background
The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) was established 35 years ago as a vital partner in the research mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Over the past year, NINR has been consulting with research, policy, and community partners in the development of a new Strategic Plan to lead nursing research and training to solve pressing health challenges and inform practice and policy—optimizing health and advancing health equity into the future.

NINR 2022-2026 Strategic Plan Framework

Guiding Principles for NINR-Supported Research
NINR supports research that:

• Is innovative, applies the most rigorous methods, and has the potential for the greatest impact on individual, community, and population health
• Advances equity, diversity, and inclusion
• Tackles today’s pressing health challenges and stimulates discoveries to prepare for, prevent, or address tomorrow’s challenges
• Discovers solutions to optimize health across clinical, community, and policy settings

NINR Research Lenses
In the NINR Strategic Plan, a research lens will frame the perspective by which to examine a health challenge. Nursing research comprises many different research lenses—each of which offers a valuable perspective by which to investigate health-related questions—illuminating a whole picture of health for individuals, communities, and populations. The NINR Strategic Plan will prioritize research framed through the following five lenses:

• Health Equity: Nursing research, with its contextualized perspective, is ideally positioned to produce evidence needed to reduce and ultimately eliminate the systemic and structural inequities that place some population groups at a disadvantage in attaining their full health potential.
• Social Determinants of Health: Nursing research is well-positioned to examine social determinants of health—the conditions in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, and age—and how these determinants affect health outcomes.
• Population and Community Health: Nursing research can address critical health challenges at a macro level by focusing on interventions that affect groups of people with shared characteristics or who live within a shared area.
• Prevention and Health Promotion: Nursing research aims to prevent disease and promote health through the continuum of prevention—from primordial prevention that targets the underlying factors that increase risk of illness, to tertiary prevention that aims to reduce disease severity, symptoms, and progression – with a particular emphasis on eliminating health disparities.
• Systems and Models of Care: Nursing research can use its solutions-focused and person-centered perspectives to address clinical, organizational, and policy challenges through the development, dissemination, and implementation of new systems and models of care, including those that bridge clinical and community care with social factors and needs.

Strategic Imperatives
NINR will support research and training in areas of science that are consistent with the Guiding Principles and developed using the perspective of at least one of the five Research Lenses. NINR will continually assess urgent or emerging health challenges to identify strategic imperatives and to solicit new research in response.

Stewardship and Implementation Planning
The Strategic Plan will include a description of scientific stewardship at NINR as well as an implementation plan that details how the Institute intends to set research priorities, manage science, and assess progress.

Request for Comments
This RFI invites input from its stakeholders and the public on the Strategic Plan Framework, with particular focus on using the NINR Research Lenses to examine health challenges.

How to Submit a Comment
All comments must be submitted electronically to: ninrstrategicplan@mail.nih.gov

Responses must be received by December 13, 2021.

Responses to this RFI are voluntary and welcome from individuals, associations, and professional organizations. The information submitted in response to this RFI will be analyzed and may be used for planning purposes at the discretion of NINR.

This RFI is a request for information only and is not a solicitation for applications or an obligation on the part of the government to provide support for any ideas identified in response to it. No awards will be made based on responses to this RFI.

Please do not include any information that you do not wish to make public. Proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should not be included in your response. NIH and the government reserve the right to use non-proprietary information in future publications, solicitations, grants, cooperative agreements, or funding opportunity announcements.

We look forward to your input and hope that you will share this RFI opportunity with your colleagues.
 

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

ninrstrategicplan@mail.nih.gov