Students Supporting Students
Nursing students create the Alliance for Clinical Excellence in Nursing
Nurses in practice face challenging situations. In order to persevere during these challenging times, nurses often lean on each other for support.
That sense of camaraderie starts early – in nursing school.
A group of University of Saskatchewan (USask) College of Nursing students have come together to form the Alliance for Clinical Excellence in Nursing (ACE) to lend each other additional support during their clinical studies.
With guidance from the University Saskatchewan Students’ Union, the nursing students from the Saskatoon Campus developed the idea of creating ACE after they put together a last minute mock objective structured clinical examination (MOSCE) for some final clinical practice in advance of their objective structured clinical examination (OSCE).
“OSCE’s were quickly approaching and students were eager to be as prepared as possible,” said 3rd year nursing student Sarah Nickel. “A few peers and I agreed we would like to facilitate some extra practice time for our nursing student community, outside of regular clinical hours. With guidance from two Saskatchewan Nursing Student Association (SNSA) past presidents, who organized MOSCE’s in the past, support from the Clinical Learning Resource Centre, and many eager student volunteers, we rallied to set up a very successful in-person MOSCE within a week.”
The MOSCE is a long-standing tradition at the College of Nursing, but this was the first in-person MOSCE since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
After seeing such a welcome response to the in-person MOSCE, the group of students decided they would build upon the MOSCE tradition to provide additional support for second and third year nursing students on their journey throughout the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program and Post-Degree Bachelor of Science in Nursing option.
On May 17th at the first official meeting, ACE was established. The students, along with faculty co-representative Cheryl Besse, created the 2022-2023 ACE constitution and committee members were voted in.
In collaboration with the SNSA, ACE will take the MOSCE tradition and create additional capacity to develop opportunities for nursing students to learn from one another.
“We are really excited to create this group to support upcoming nursing students in their clinical studies,” said 3rd year nursing student and co-president of ACE, Ashlyn Froehlich. “From planning MOSCE’s to connecting students to lab resources to communicating volunteer opportunities where students can practice their clinical skills….there is so much we can do to support each other.”
ACE membership will be open to everyone at the University of Saskatchewan College of Nursing. The executive will meet at least three times during the academic year, including an annual general meeting. Dr. Shelley Peacock (PhD) will serve as the second faculty representative, alongside Cheryl Besse.
For more information on ACE, please contact ACE co-presidents Ashlyn Froehlich and Shaelyn Putnam or ACE director of communications Kaeli Wyard-Scott.