| Washington, DC — As the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turns 30 today, the National League for Nursing takes special pride in the role of nursing education in promoting the unique value of all individuals. Guided by the League’s Core Values—Diversity/Inclusion; Caring; Integrity; and Excellence—a host of programmatic and strategic directions in nursing education have evolved that reflect the mandate of the ADA to prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal opportunity to people with disabilities.
Among these have been a National League for Nursing initiative to encourage schools of nursing to actively recruit and hire faculty with disabilities and prioritize admission to pre-licensure and advanced degree nursing programs for applicants who may be similarly marginalized. “The National League for Nursing’s historic commitment to excellence in nursing education is foundational to the League’s long-standing endorsement of and support for the ADA,” said NLN President Patricia S. Yoder-Wise, RN, EdD, NEA-BC, ANEF, FAONL, FAAN, Professor and Dean Emerita at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and president of The Wise Group. “Nurse educators responsible for preparing a diverse, culturally sensitive nursing workforce help ensure that every patient, regardless of physical or mental status, is fully seen, heard, and receives care appropriate to his or her circumstances.” Another National League for Nursing endeavor aligned with the ADA’s legacy of civil rights is the signature faculty development program, ACE Series, Advancing Care Excellence for Vulnerable Populations. The series provides free, downloadable, classroom-ready resources for nurse educators. In 2017, following the time-tested series’ model employing unfolding cases, teaching strategies, and additional curricular materials, the League added ACE.D, Advancing Care Excellence for Persons with Disabilities. The ACE.D module includes two unfolding cases, two teaching strategies, and five additional resource documents.
ACE.D seeks to redress what has been described as a systemic unfamiliarity and disregard of disability in both nursing education and nursing practice. ACE.D, which brings disability into the mainstream of nursing education, has a two-fold goal. One is to enable nursing faculty to increase their own knowledge and understanding of disability as it relates to equal access to health care. The second is to better educate nursing students to deliver high-quality, sensitive care to people with diverse disabilities across the lifespan and across disparate health care settings, ranging from in-home or chronic care facilities to acute care in major medical centers.
NLN CEO Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN, said, “We have been gratified by the positive feedback from faculty and the steady use of ACE.D—strong evidence that this teaching resource is well utilized by the nursing education community. It speaks to the relevance of instructing today’s and future generations of nurses in how to provide the highest level of care to this specific vulnerable patient population.”
For complete information about and access to the National League for Nursing ACE.D program, click here. Read the latest NLN TEQ TechnologyEdge blog post on ACE.D in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
| 
