As part of the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council’s (MCHC’s) commitment to building a thriving workforce for the communities we serve, we are pleased to provide support for the South Metropolitan Higher Education Consortium (SMHEC) Standard Clinical Affiliation Agreement Project.

In 2006, the SMHEC spearheaded the development of an affiliation agreement for use by health care providers and educational programs. This Agreement is designed to minimize the extent to which providers and educational entities need to customize an affiliation agreement for every health care program requiring a clinical rotation, thereby reducing the personnel time spent on contract review, and freeing the staff to focus their efforts on other critical activities. The expeditious signing of the agreements places students in clinical rotations faster, thus improving student satisfaction with the clinical experience.

A task force including: SMHEC, MCHC, Illinois Hospital Association (IHA), Illinois Coalition for Nursing Resources (ICNR), and hospital staff and educators representing the entire metropolitan Chicago area participated in the development and review of this document. A number of hospitals and colleges in the Chicago Southland region volunteered to pilot the document for one year, beginning in the summer of 2006. As a part of the pilot process the document went through a series of reviews and revisions by attorneys, hospital and college staff. The year long pilot was completed in spring, 2007, and the document is now available in updated form for use in Illinois colleges, universities and health care institutions which provide clinical experiences.

As this important tool moves out of the pilot phase toward full implementation, the agreement and all related materials will be distributed to all requestors by MCHC. We will also develop a database of user organizations to enable us to notify you of any review, changes and/or enhancements to these tools.

To receive your copy of the Standard Clinical Affiliation Agreementand related materials, please click below and submit your request to Gillian Rawling, Program Manager, Workforce Development at MCHC.