ACE's Goals

  • Improve nursing student education with a realistic, immersive, experiential learning where they are embedded in UMMS' hospital culture
  • Fortify UMMS' hospital workforces
  • Recruit nursing students to join UMMS as new graduate nurses
  • Decrease orientation time and costs over time
  • Diversify UMMS nurses' roles to increase job engagement, satisfaction, and professional development

Benefits of ACE

The UMMS Academy of Clinical Essentials (ACE) is a mutually beneficial model for schools of nursing, nursing students, University of Maryland Medical System workforce, and the profession of nursing.

How Nursing Students Will Benefit

Students will:

  • Receive a vibrant, realistic, experiential, competency-based education in the clinical setting
  • Learn from instructors who are knowledgeable about team members and the policies, practices and protocols of the hospital and specific units
  • Learn from instructors who are already acclimated to the unit and integrated in the care delivery team
  • Develop deeper insight into hospital-based nursing by caring for patients for an entire 12.5-hour shift
  • Be in a small cohort of students paired with an instructor
  • Be embedded into the culture and fabric of care delivery on the unit

How Nursing Schools Will Benefit

Schools will:

  • Have more clinical instructors
  • Have clinical instructors found and funded by UMMS
  • Receive more clinical sites for student rotations
  • Increase their ability to admit more qualified applicants

How UMMS Will Benefit

UMMS and its nurses will:

  • Fortify the current workforce
  • Create a strong nurse recruitment pipeline
  • Diversify the role of the bedside nurse
  • Improve nurse engagement and job satisfaction
  • Enable nurses to advance more quickly through the Professional Advancement Model (PAM)
  • Decrease the time and cost of nurse graduate onboarding

How the Nursing Profession Will Benefit

  • As more qualified applicants are accepted into nursing programs, more nurses will be educated
  • Additional nurse graduates will add to the supply of nurses in hospitals and other settings