The costs and benefits of nurse-midwifery education: model and application

To promote nurse-midwifery education, it is important for educators to know the value students bring to clinical training sites and academic institutions, the value nurse-midwifery graduates bring to taxpayers who help support nurse-midwifery education, and the value an education in nurse-midwifery brings to the graduate. The first purpose of this study was to develop a model to include all costs and benefits of nurse-midwifery education to: 1) students; 2) clinical sites where nurse-midwifery students obtain clinical experience; 3) academic institutions that house nurse-midwifery education programs; and 4) others (most often taxpayers) who may contribute to nurse-midwifery education. The second purpose of the study was to develop a prototype nurse-midwifery education program to illustrate the use of the model. Considering the four entities together, the costs, benefits, and net benefits to society were estimated. Data were collected to estimate all costs and benefits to the four entities as they function within this prototypical program. For the prototype, all entities realize a net benefit from the investment in nurse-midwifery education. For society, the benefit-cost ratio is 1.57. Nurse-midwifery students show the highest benefit-cost ratio (2.05) of the four entities, followed by the clinical sites, others (primarily taxpayers), and academic institutions.