I've had one heck of a week, or couple of weeks, or several months, I guess. Our school of nursing was preparing for our national accreditation visit this week. Every 10 years (or sooner) we are visited by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and have to prepare a lengthy document called a self study. Ours was about 400 pages long. It contains information about every aspect of our school of nursing: resources, students, faculty, curriculum and evaluation.
I had to do a significant portion of it on our Nurse Practitioner programs (we have 5). I wrote the report last fall and then had to prepare all the materials for the visit this week. Materials consist of evidence for all the things you write about in the report. For example, they want to know about all the courses we teach in all the programs, so we have to copy the course pages with title, description, objectives, adn activities from each syllabus and put them on display.
They also want to see minutes of all our meetings, curriculum meetings, admission meetings, and the like. They want to see all our evaluation data, questions we ask the students about their preparation. They look at the pass rates for our RN exams and the certification exams for the nurse practitioners, and they look at a zillion other things too. It is just a massive undertaking. We have had someone working on it for 2 years and I've been working on it since September.
WHEW! The visitors were here Wed/Thurs/Fri. I had several meetings with them and at these meetings, they can ask you ANYTHING!!! You don't necessarily have to know all the answers, but you do have to get the answers for them. Of course, there are certain things that you SHOULD know, and I was able to answer all their questions. WHEW!
Anyway, in our exit interview today, we passed all criteria with no deficiencies, which will likely mean we'll get accredited for 10 more years. We won't know though for sure, till October. But things went exceedingly well this week, so I'm sure we will get the 10 years. That means we won't have another visit for 10 more years. YAY! (maybe I'll be retired by then. LOL!)
I am so tired though, I feel like I ran a marathon this week. And to top it off, I have to travel to Washington DC Sunday, for some very long and tedious meetings next week - Mon though Thursday. I won't be home till midnight on Thursday. I will be so tired when I get home I won't be able to wiggle!!!
So I'll be reading the forum all next week, but probably won't post too much as I'll only have my phone to get on the internet.
You all don't get into any trouble without me!
