What you’ll learn in this article…
- VCU and VCU Health won the 2026 AACN Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award.
- Quarterly dean and CNO sessions plus faculty practice assemblies anchor the governance.
- Rewritten promotion criteria let five faculty earn advancement through clinical excellence.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing gave its 2026 Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award to the VCU School of Nursing and VCU Health System, recognizing a collaboration formalized in 2021 and built on shared governance rather than goodwill alone. The news release reads less like a trophy announcement than a design file: quarterly executive sessions, monthly faculty practice assemblies, 14 focus groups, five faculty promoted on clinical excellence.
Most school-practice agreements stall on the same three problems: no meeting anyone keeps, no promotion credit for clinical work, and no mechanism turning faculty practice into supervised student hours. VCU solved each in writing. The tension is protected time, which costs money in a market where instructor pay varies widely by state and setting.
What the AACN Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award Actually Measures
Two schools can build nearly the same partnership and submit very different award files. One leads with reputation and a long roster of clinical placements. The other leads with a governance chart and outcomes it can count. The second approach is the one AACN's Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award is built to find, and it is why the 2026 honor for the VCU School of Nursing and VCU Health System is worth reading as a template rather than a trophy.
What the criteria actually ask for
The academic partner must be an AACN member institution. The relationship has to be innovative and sustained, extend beyond clinical placements, show commitment to the AACN and American Organization for Nursing Leadership Guiding Principles, produce measurable positive outcomes, and have been in place at least one year. Institutional prestige and program size are not on that list.
How a nomination is built
The academic institution submits through AACN's online application, capped at one nomination per school each year. The file includes a one-page partnership description, a Goals and Outcomes Matrix that names goals, action steps, expected outcomes and timeframes, and the case model entered in the AACN/AONL Case Model Repository. An awards review committee screens submissions, and the AACN Board of Directors gives final approval. AACN publishes the criteria but not point values or weighting, so there is no formula to game.
That is the practical value of VCU's win. Because the rubric rewards structural change documented with numbers, a strong submission reads like a build checklist. Read the VCU partnership that way, governance first and outcomes second, and you have a working plan for your own school-practice agreement.
The Eight Guiding Principles and 2021 Essentials, Mapped to VCU's Partnership
The eight AACN/AONL Guiding Principles are written as commitments rather than action items, so the useful question for nurse educators is what each one looks like on the ground. VCU's announcement states that the partnership aligns with the 2021 AACN Essentials but does not assign individual activities to specific domains, so the domain column below is our reading of where each activity most naturally lands.
| AACN/AONL Guiding Principle | How the VCU Partnership Put It to Work | 2021 AACN Essentials Domain It Supports |
|---|---|---|
| Principle 1: Collaborative relationships between academia and practice are established and sustained | Partnership formalized in 2021 and steered by quarterly strategic sessions with the dean, chief nursing officers, associate chief nursing officers, and the associate vice president of advanced practice providers, plus monthly faculty practice assemblies | Domain 6: Interprofessional Partnerships |
| Principle 2: Mutual respect and trust are the cornerstones of the practice/academia relationship | 70 key stakeholders across 14 focus groups co-designed the shared leadership framework | Domain 9: Professionalism |
| Principle 3: Knowledge is shared among partners | 237 VCU Health clinicians mentored 727 advanced practice students, who completed 77,890 clinical hours | Domain 1: Knowledge for Nursing Practice |
| Principle 4: A shared commitment to maximize the potential of each registered nurse within their scope of practice | Guaranteed admission into the RN-to-BS program for VCU Health registered nurses with associate degrees, with application fees reimbursed and tuition assistance provided | Domain 10: Personal, Professional, and Leadership Development |
| Principle 5: An evidence-based transition program for students and new graduates that is sustainable and cost effective | Enterprise-wide nurse residency for new graduates, which recently earned 10-year accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education | Domain 5: Quality and Safety |
| Principle 6: Organizational processes and structures that support and recognize academic or educational achievement | Appointment, promotion, and tenure guidelines formally recognize clinical practice excellence, and five faculty members earned promotion through clinical and scholarly excellence | Domain 4: Scholarship for the Nursing Discipline |
| Principle 7: Opportunities for nurses to lead and develop collaborative models that redesign practice to improve health outcomes | The Mobile Health and Wellness Program, where faculty and nursing students deliver preventive and chronic disease care across eight rural and urban communities | Domain 3: Population Health |
| Principle 8: Infrastructure to collect and analyze data on current and future RN workforce needs | Quarterly leadership sessions serve as standing capacity planning: undergraduate enrollment doubled to more than 650 students between 2021 and 2026, most rotating through VCU Health facilities | Domain 7: Systems-Based Practice |
Inside the Governance Model: Quarterly Sessions, Faculty Practice Assemblies, and 14 Focus Groups
Most schools and health systems now have a partnership agreement somewhere in a drawer; far fewer have a governance calendar that anyone actually keeps. VCU School of Nursing and VCU Health System, which formalized their partnership in 2021 and won the 2026 AACN Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award, built two tiers that meet on a schedule.
The executive tier
Quarterly strategic sessions bring the School of Nursing dean together with the system's chief nursing officers, associate chief nursing officers, and the associate vice president of advanced practice providers. This tier sets direction: shared goals for clinical placements, faculty practice expectations, workforce pipeline commitments, and the resources behind them. Anything requiring budget or a policy exception escalates here.
The operational tier
Monthly faculty practice assemblies are where classroom and clinical faculty settle the working details: who supervises which students, how schedules line up with unit staffing, credentialing, and practice logistics. Problems that can be solved with a calendar change stay at this level.
The step most schools skip
Before the structure was fixed, 70 key stakeholders across 14 focus groups co-designed the shared leadership framework. That phase turns a memorandum into something faculty will actually use.
Recurring senior-leader contact is the trust mechanism. As dean Patricia Kinser, Ph.D., described it, the quarterly gatherings are how both institutions confirm their needs are being met, rather than meeting once a year for a photograph. Draft your own agenda from that split: strategy, money, and policy at the top; supervision and scheduling at the base.
Rewriting Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure so Clinical Practice Counts
Five VCU School of Nursing faculty members earned academic promotion through clinical and scholarly excellence after the school rewrote its appointment, promotion, and tenure guidelines to formally recognize clinical practice. Carry that sentence into your dean's office. Conventional criteria reward funded research and peer-reviewed publication, so clinically expert faculty either stall at assistant professor or leave for roles that value what they already do.
Draftable policy language
Define clinical scholarship in writing before anyone is reviewed under it: the systematic study of practice problems, the generation of evidence from care delivery, and the translation of that evidence into education. Then name the evidence you will accept.
- Practice improvement projects with measured outcomes
- Protocol, pathway, and policy development adopted by the partner hospital
- Precepting and student outcome data, including faculty practice hours that supervise learners
- Dissemination through clinical journals, conferences, and continuing education
Train the reviewers too. A committee built solely around grant funding will default to grant dollars.
What comparators show
Evidence standards vary widely across U.S. schools. Florida Atlantic counts 8 hours per week of practice at designated sites as 22.5% of workload while still requiring at least one course per semester.1 Kentucky assigns 20% to 40% of effort to practice unless otherwise negotiated.2 OHSU lets promotion rest on two or three mission areas, which allows clinical care to carry the case.3
The sticking point: protected time
Most policies go quiet on three questions: how much protected time an appointment carries, who funds it, and how practice hours count toward workload. Write those answers into the document: an effort percentage, a named funding source (hospital contract, practice plan, or school budget), and a rule that clinical hours supervising students count as teaching, not service.
Related Articles
What Nursing Instructors Earn, and Why Protected Clinical Time Is Contested
Pay shapes the workload fight.
Converting Faculty Practice Into Supervised Student Hours
The most underused placement pipeline in nursing education is the one already standing inside your own faculty's practice settings. When a faculty member holds a clinical practice appointment, that educator can supervise students inside the same unit, clinic, or advanced practice site where they deliver care. Service hours and student clinical hours come out of one shift, one badge, and one set of relationships with the clinical team.
What VCU's Numbers Show
Scale is possible. Between 2021 and 2026, VCU reported that 237 health system clinicians mentored 727 advanced practice students through 77,890 clinical hours. Of those, 17,899 hours were overseen directly through faculty practice. That last figure matters most: it is the portion where a School of Nursing appointment, not a volunteer preceptor arrangement, carried the supervision.
Making Those Hours Defensible
Accreditors and clinical placement offices want evidence, not volume. Three things make faculty-supervised hours hold up:
- A named supervisor of record: one faculty member accountable for each student's clinical experience, documented in the affiliation agreement.
- A competency rubric mapped to Essentials domains: each shift generates a rating against named competencies, not a sign-in sheet.
- An audit trail: evaluations, hour logs, and preceptor feedback stored where a site visit can retrieve them.
Hours logged without evaluation evidence create placement volume, not competency evidence. If a student completed 500 hours and no one can show what they were judged competent to do, the partnership produced scheduling, not learning.
Academic-practice partnerships must live and breathe at the bedside and in the lecture hall, a bidirectional exchange in which each setting sharpens the other.
Building a Retention Pipeline: Guaranteed RN-to-BS Admission and Employer Tuition Support
A tuition discount alone is a gesture. A guaranteed seat with fees covered and tuition assistance behind it is a pipeline. That is the distinction VCU Health System and the VCU School of Nursing built into their partnership: registered nurses at the health system who hold associate degrees receive guaranteed admission into the school's RN-to-BS program, and VCU Health reimburses their application fees and provides tuition assistance.
Why both halves matter
The guarantee removes the anxiety of competing for a seat, and the employer money removes the cost barrier that stalls so many working nurses. Together they turn a vague encouragement to "go back for your BSN" into a decision an ADN-prepared nurse can actually make on a night shift schedule.
The dual return
The health system protects its BSN pipeline and reduces turnover among experienced bedside nurses. The school gains a predictable cohort of employed adult learners who bring clinical judgment into the classroom. Neither side is doing the other a favor; each is solving its own workforce problem with the same enrollment.
The pitch checklist
Walk into a partner conversation with numbers, not enthusiasm:
- Baseline: the current ADN share of the partner's nursing staff.
- Cost of turnover: what a single vacancy costs the system, so tuition support reads as a saving.
- Cohort size: a target the school can staff and the system can release.
- Timeline: a realistic completion window for part-time, working students.
Bring those four figures and the conversation shifts from goodwill to operations.
In 2025, U.S. nursing schools turned away 92,672 qualified applications to baccalaureate and graduate programs, citing insufficient faculty, clinical sites, preceptors, and budget constraints, per AACN's 2026 Nursing Faculty Shortage Fact Sheet. Partnerships built to grow faculty capacity change that math.
Connecting a CCNE-Accredited Nurse Residency to the Curriculum
A newly accredited residency can look like the employer's win alone. Your decision as an educator is whether to treat that year as clinical onboarding or as the capstone of your curriculum. New graduates in the VCU partnership enter an enterprise-wide nurse residency that recently earned 10-year accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education. That term is continued accreditation, awarded after substantial compliance, not the shorter initial term.
Where the Residency Touches the Curriculum
The residency year reinforces the Essentials domains a new graduate is actually practicing: person-centered care, quality and safety, interprofessional partnerships, systems-based practice, and professionalism. MSN nurse educator students can step into that year as co-teachers of residency seminars, simulation debriefers, and competency validators working under faculty supervision.
Faculty Roles That Count
Teaching, competency assessment, and preceptor development are the realistic entry points. Protect them the way VCU protects clinical practice. If your appointment and promotion guidelines recognize clinical practice excellence, document residency teaching as faculty practice, and treat curriculum design, preceptor workshops, and outcome evaluation as scholarship.
Before You Claim Credit
Verify three things. First, which CCNE standards apply: the 2021 residency standards run through Dec. 31, 2026, and the 2026 standards take effect Jan. 1, 2027, moving partnership provisions from Standard II to Standard I. Second, your state board's rules on counting residency hours toward academic credit or faculty practice. Third, the partner's own outcome data, including completion and competency results, rather than the accreditation label alone.
Where Replication Gets Hard: Cost, Protected Time, and the First 90 Days
VCU formalized its partnership in 2021 and collected the AACN Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award in 2026. Budget for a five-year arc of incremental wins, not a first-year transformation.
The cost lines that need an owner
- Protected faculty time: reassigned hours for quarterly strategic sessions, monthly faculty practice assemblies, and bedside supervision.
- Practice appointment compensation: paying for hours that generate neither a standard teaching load nor standard clinical revenue.
- Tuition assistance: the guaranteed RN-to-BS pathway works because VCU Health reimburses application fees and contributes tuition support.
- Governance labor: staff and administrator hours absorbed by focus groups and shared committees.
Name a funding owner for each line before anyone signs.
Three risks that sink partnerships
- A governance structure that outruns buy-in, where leaders commit to committees faculty never asked for.
- Metrics nobody baselined in year one, so year five has nothing to compare against.
- Clinical hours that cannot be documented against a competency rubric, which turns mentorship into unverifiable goodwill.
The first 90 days
Pick one program and one partner unit. Baseline two metrics, such as mentor counts and supervised clinical hours. Make one policy change: add clinical practice excellence to appointment and promotion criteria.
Then reuse the award criteria as an annual self-audit, not a submission form.
