SYRACUSE — A joint nurse-training program pioneered by Syracuse’s St. Joseph’s College of Nursing and Le Moyne College is becoming a model for institutions across the state because of a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program, known as the Dual Degree Partnership in Nursing program, will be spread to other nursing schools […]
SYRACUSE — A joint nurse-training program pioneered by Syracuse’s St. Joseph’s College of Nursing and Le Moyne College is becoming a model for institutions across the state because of a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The program, known as the Dual Degree Partnership in Nursing program, will be spread to other nursing schools using funding from the Princeton, N.J.–based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation granted $300,000 over two years to the cause and could renew its funding for an additional two years and $300,000.
The Dual Degree Partnership in Nursing program has students earn both associate and bachelor’s degrees in nursing in four years. It also lets students sit for the National Council of State Boards of Nursing’s National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses after three years.
St. Joseph’s and Le Moyne launched the program in 2005.
“It really came about because we wanted youth,” says Marianne Markowitz, dean of St. Joseph’s College of Nursing, which is located at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center and offers associate degrees in nursing.
“The youth were having difficulty doing my program in two years,” Markowitz continues. “They were taking three. We realized they needed that first year to get acclimated to college.”
St. Joseph’s and Le Moyne structured the joint nurse-training program to have students live on Le Moyne’s campus for four years. Students spend their first year at Le Moyne taking classes, then commute to St. Joseph’s for their middle two years to earn their associate degrees. They can take the National Council Licensure Examination after their third year, before returning to class at Le Moyne in their fourth year to earn their bachelor’s degrees.
That program model has helped retain students and boosted their success on the National Council Licensure Examination, according to Markowitz. In 2011, 96 percent of Dual Degree Partnership in Nursing program students passed the exam on their first attempt, she says. That compares to a statewide average of 84.7 percent of students coming out of associate-degree programs who passed the test on their first try that year.
All of the Dual Degree Partnership in Nursing students passed the test on their second try in 2011, Markowitz adds. About 50 students enter the joint program between St. Joseph’s and Le Moyne each year, she says.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant will help spread the joint nurse-training program’s model by funding coordination between schools that are already working to follow it. And the grant will give those schools a stipend for expenses like marketing, according to Susan Bastable, chair of the Department of Nursing at Le Moyne.
“[Markowitz] and I are going to serve as consultants and travel around the state, individually visiting programs,” Bastable says. “The purpose in doing so is to give them best practices. We didn’t struggle when starting the program, but we learned as we went along. Why not share that knowledge? We learned a lot of really good things to make sure that the student is really successful.”
Currently, 18 institutions are following the joint nurse-training model, including St. Joseph’s and Le Moyne. But that number could be on the rise.
That’s because some of the grant funding is earmarked for outreach to nursing schools that do not take part in a joint-training program. Bastable has identified about eight more schools that would be good candidates to establish their own dual-degree partnership programs, she says.
Data collection will also be funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant. The Foundation of New York State Nurses, a not-for-profit organization that attempts to increase public knowledge of nursing, is slated to set up a data repository to collect information from schools with joint nurse-training programs.
The Foundation of New York State Nurses is administering the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funding. Money will be channeled through the New York State Future of Nursing Action Coalition.
Bastable says that although schools are modeling their programs after the one set up between St. Joseph’s and Le Moyne, they aren’t going to duplicate it.
“The partners, the institutions, they may encounter things we haven’t,” she says. “We felt that others could replicate, not necessarily duplicate like a cookie cutter.”
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com