6-day Surgical

SKILLLAB™

ACE Surgical Assisting is more than just a place for training

It's where students come to be transformed!

Skills acquisition at its best! Crown Jewel of the Surgical Assistant Program. Six days of intensive hands-on training. Gain incredible expertise for real-world practice.

Are you looking to become a surgical assistant? Your search ends here. At ACE, you don’t just get the wound closure skills you need for the end of surgery. That would make us the same as the rest. You also get the skills you need to assist at surgeon-level throughout the case. Don’t get stuck in ‘holding retractors, suctioning, and cutting sutures’ mode. Imagine first assisting like surgeons assist. Wouldn’t that be more challenging and rewarding?

Why Choose

ACE?

Are you looking for your big break in surgery? Your search ends here. At ACE, you don’t just get the wound closure skills you need for the end of surgery. That would make us the same as the rest. Our surgical skill lab also teaches the skills you need to assist at the same level as the surgeon throughout every case you take on. Don’t get stuck holding retractors, suctioning, and cutting sutures for every surgery you are a part of. Instead, you’ll receive the training you need to help at a higher level. Imagine first assisting like surgeons first assist. Wouldn’t that be more challenging and rewarding?

How do we manage this transformation? ACE’s Surgical SkillLab! After six days of proper hands-on training, you’ll be well prepared to start first assisting in surgery at surgeon-level. Why did we set the bar at surgeon-level? Actually, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) did. According to the ACS, “ideally, the first assistant at the operating table should be a qualified surgeon or a resident in an approved surgical education program.” ACE-trained assistants should not be the assistant of second choice or somehow less than the ‘ideal’ assistant. So, we take the ‘ideal’ expounded by the ACS as both a challenge and a standard — and it shows in our training and in our high-performing alumni. We aim to educate each one of our students to the point that they can take on more responsibility than students of other programs and serve at a high level of expertise.

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The First Impression

There is a philosophy that has contributed greatly to the teaching and program design at ACE and in our surgical first assistant programs. This philosophy is eloquently stated in just three words — ‘surgeons are judgmental.’ When a surgeon first starts working with you, they judge your performance in order to protect their patients and evaluate your ability to contribute to each surgery. Will you be judged worthy of more opportunities to perform at surgeon-level (career-building)? Or will the surgeon judge that their patient must be protected from you (career-breaking)? Your training and your devotion to mastery are crucial to making those career-building first impressions. ACE’s six days of hands-on training are focused like a laser on helping you make the best first impression possible. What does that impression look like? First, you need to exude confidence in your skills and the new role you are assuming. Lack of self-confidence can destroy the surgeon’s confidence in you. Our surgical skill lab can help you gain that confidence so your first impression is top-notch. Second, you need to perform like a seasoned expert even though you are a new surgical assistant. Our six days of intensive training will help you to perform like a seasoned pro no matter what you are taking on.

We make it our mission not just to cover the skills as though we had a checklist to get through. We must have a high impact on your confidence and your level of expertise. That’s a tall order, so how do we do it?

Confidence

Increased exposure to skills increases confidence. Just being exposed in a hands-on environment to these skills for six days can dramatically increase your confidence — and it shows. A period of six days has been demonstrated over time to be a key element in building confidence. You will see things in our program that grow your comfortability with surgeries and help to improve on your knowledge of the human body, growing your confidence in the process. Confidence also comes from an inner feeling that, at last, you have learned the correct skills and that you won’t be embarrassing yourself in front of your surgeons and peers. If you are looking to grow in confidence, contact us about our surgical skill lab today!

Expertise

Expertise: Once again, we will have spent six days with you on these skills. We don’t just cover them in a checklist fashion. You gain hands-on experience that you can only get in a hospital. You spend six days with your skills and a coach to help you get the most out of your training is enough to acquire a practical level of expertise. As important as time is to skills mastery, what follows could be even more important. We teach you skills the way experts perform them, not the way that novice assistants explain them.

As it turns out, training up experts through expert opinions and actual experience is not much more challenging than training up surgical assistants with only some of the information they need. You’d think everybody would aim to train up experts — but they don’t. One reason may be that skills training is often designed in ‘ivory towers’ far removed from the day-to-day practice of surgical assisting, making a connection between the real world and the classroom more difficult to substantiate. But ACE training was born in the trenches, out of the real-life struggles for success in the operating room. If that kind of training appeals to you, then ACE is your perfect choice for training.

We make it our mission not just to cover the skills as though we had a checklist to get through. We must have a high impact on your confidence and your level of expertise. That’s a tall order, so how do we do it?

Reliable Surgical Training

For more information about this program, reach out to us today. We would love to share more information about our surgical skill lab as well as our other programs like our online surgical assistant programs. Get started with your surgical career today!