To ensure quality care for patients, retention of experienced emergency and critical care nurses is essential to maintaining specialty expertise in these practice settings.

Two university-based schools of nursing and two healthcare regions, supported by a nurses' union, have formed an intersectoral collaboration to develop a practice educator curriculum. The curriculum is designed to increase educator capacity and practice-academic relationships. This article describes the preliminary groundwork among intersectoral partners. Practice and academic educators do not always recognize each others' expertise or share resources effectively. An online survey and focus groups were conducted to identify educators' similar successes and challenges, their perspectives of key criteria necessary to establish practice-academic collaborations and learning environments, and intent to leave. The findings revealed many similarities across sectors, although practice and academic educators had different foci or perspectives that will need to be bridged by the collaboration. Strategies are suggested to maximize educators' commonalities, provide better supports to minimize intent to leave, and ensure sustainability.

In this paper, we begin by providing an overview of the Educator Pathway Project (EPP), an education infrastructure that was developed in response to emerging critical nursing workplace issues, and the related demand for enhanced workplace education. We then describe the EPP competency-based curriculum designed to prepare nurses as preceptors, mentors, and educators to lead learning with diverse learner groups. This competency-based curriculum was developed through a collaboration of nurse leaders across practice, academic, and union sectors and drew from a widely embraced curriculum development model (Iwasiw, Goldenberg, & Andrusyzyn, 2005). The goal of the curriculum was to prepare nurses through a four-level career pathway model that contextualized practice and education theory to various education-related roles and levels of experience within the practice setting. Over 1,100 nurses participated in this innovative intersectoral nursing initiative.