St. Louis-based SSM Health, which operates 23 hospitals across four states, unveiled a program July 9 designed to produce 400 additional nursing graduates annually.
The new direct-placement training model will embed Bachelor of Science in Nursing students at SSM facilities, a shift the system said will cut training time and build workplace familiarity faster than traditional rotations across multiple hospitals.
Amid a growing nursing shortage and aging population, creating a sustainable nursing pipeline is mission critical, Amy Wilson, DNP, RN, chief nurse executive of SSM Health, told Becker’s.
SSM is collaborating with Chamberlain University, a college for nursing and healthcare professions degrees through in-person and online programs, to launch the Aspiring Nurse Program.
At Chamberlain, where the average student age is in their late 20s, SSM is tapping into a population of students who otherwise might not go into clinical nursing practice, Dr. Wilson said. These students might have already entered the workforce and have growing family responsibilities.
“What makes this relationship unique is that we’re actually granting access to nontraditional students who can thrive within our healthcare systems,” she said.
Another benefit of partnering with Chamberlain is access to its program titled Practice Ready. Specialty Focused. At no extra cost, third-year BSN students can receive 16 weeks of specialty courses and eight weeks of supervised clinical experience in one of five areas: emergency, home health, nephrology, perioperative and oncology nursing.
Dr. Wilson highlighted home health, perioperative and emergency nursing as especially critical pipelines to develop. With integrating specialty training within the BSN program, there is less burden on the system to recruit these roles, she said.
The Aspiring Nurse Program is projected to produce 400 nurses annually, according to a July 9 news release from the health system. The first cohort will begin in fall 2025, and SSM locations in Oklahoma will go live with the program before being followed by Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois.
A similar program of the same name is underway at Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine. The system’s program offers student nurses up to $25,000 in cash, one-on-one mentorship and clinical rounding sites in exchange for a three-year work agreement.
Unlike WVU Medicine, SSM Health is not requiring Aspiring Nurse Program students to sign a work agreement. However, if a student works for four years within SSM Health after graduation, they are eligible for full loan repayment.
“We recognize that life changes and challenges happen,” Dr. Wilson said. “We wanted to design a relationship that really looked different, and we thought a loan forgiveness over time would make more sense and be more appealing to our current generations that are in the workforce.”
For other health systems considering a similar initiative, she recommended they reinvent their academia partnerships.
“The things I would ask other healthcare systems to think about is to really be thoughtful about, ‘How are we adding additional nurses to the population and to the pipeline?'” Dr. Wilson said. “It’s not good enough just to move people around from university to university or healthcare system to healthcare system. We actually do need to produce more.”
