- Integrated schools have a philosophy that, by integrating many different disciplines into nursing curriculum and by working with professionals with many different skills, nurses can provide better care to patients after being licensed. These schools provide a more generalized approach to nursing to cover many areas, and they emphasize a team-nursing approach.
- Non-integrated (traditional) nursing schools hold the philosophy that, although teams can be beneficial, each nurse needs to be able to stand on her own. Curriculum tends to be a little more specific, with not as much emphasis on teamwork. These schools may be favored by nurses who know they want to work as private health care workers, because private nurses may not have a body of co-workers on whom to rely for assistance.
- A study by Muriel Williams Lessner found that low ACT scores may be a predictor of whether a student will drop out of a nursing school with a non-integrated program. Lower scores had higher dropout rates. For integrated programs, there were no significant differences in ACT scores.
- Attrition rates are higher in integrated nursing programs than in non-integrated. This suggests that integrated programs, for whatever reason, may have a component or components that are more stressful for nursing students. It may be that the necessity of working with other people from many disciplines--the very thing that theoretically is supposed to result in better health care--causes interpersonal conflicts that make the program more difficult to handle.
- Nurses from non-integrated programs have higher licensure and covariate scores. This may be because students in non-integrated programs know they are responsible for handling all topics and concepts, and that no one else is going to provide an answer. This can motivate students to work harder or in a different way than integrated students. This is not to say that integrated students don't work as hard, but rather their approach may be less effective in terms of learning.
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