Schools with nursing centers: a 5-year follow-up study

The article reviews the growing body of literature that examines academic nursing centers in the aggregate including the first such study conducted by the primary author 5 years earlier. A follow-up study to this original work was conducted to determine current demographics and faculty practice policies of schools or colleges of nursing that operate nursing centers and to compare these findings with those of schools without nursing centers. A survey was sent to the deans or directors of the 462 National League of Nursing (NLN)-accredited baccalaureate nursing programs. Although there were 362 respondents to the survey (78 per cent), only 41 indicated they had a nursing center. Schools with nursing centers were significantly more likely to be in public institutions (P = .05), and offer master's degrees (P = .01). They also were significantly larger (P = .01), with a mean of 34 full time-equivalent (FTE) faculty members. Then the administrative policies of schools with nursing centers (N = 41) were compared with those of schools without centers but with practicing faculty (N = 187). Requiring practice was not a common policy in either group. While about one-third of both groups had practice plans, the majority were described as informal. More schools with nursing centers had other formalized practice arrangements than did schools without centers (P = .01). Faculty practice was more likely to be a criterion for promotion (P = .05) but not for tenure in schools with nursing centers. An inverse relationship (P = .05) was found between the amount of practice revenue generated and the presence of a nursing center.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)