I have been talking about it for awhile and asking you to pray about it for a long while too. Both our hospital and nursing school were due this year for accreditation. The process here (and it is similar in the US) involves preparation of many documents that are then submitted to the accreditation team and reviewed by them before a site visit. The site visit for the nursing school happened on February 5th (which also happens to be my sister Kristin's birthday!) but there many many hours of work and late nights before that, starting with the deadline to submit the documents several months ago and then again in the final days before the site visit. Here are a couple of pictures of many meetings held in the days prior. You can see the stacks of documents being prepared and finally shaping up to look quite nice in color coded files in our conference room ready to be shown to the assessors during the site visit.
The day of the site visit dressing up in your official Nursing School uniform was required. It is all polyester with long sleeves so it doesn't come out of my closet very often :) The school also got dressed up with a nice banner welcoming the assessors, some new paint, and trees trimmed.
The scheduled visit is suppose to last 3 days including travel time but our assessors were hoping for a quicker trip so we did it all in one day with travel the day before and after. That meant an early start and a late finish. It was after 9 pm before we were done and they were stressful hours so everyone was quite worn down by the day's end. Following introductions (and barely waiting for those to finish) the assessors went for our jugular which is our lack of master's prepared teachers. Those who actually have a master's in nursing is one - me. We have one in school and plans for at least two others to go back if they can pass the entrance exams. We also have several with master's degrees in health or related field but technically not enough and I don't even really count as a foreigner. It felt like that put us on the defense from the beginning and caused people to be more nervous resulting in several missed steps. One assessor in particular kept asking the tough questions and pushing for the documentation to prove it.
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| The assessor is on the right. One left are three of our staff explaining some of our documentation. |
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| By the end of the day we all looking a little worn around the edges! |
Our final grade was issued last week and we got a C. We had been hoping for a B but based on what I saw of the standards I think a C is fair. I could however probably argue that the standards are based on a developed country (I think there is a strong chance they are pretty much borrowed from somewhere in Europe or America) or at least a nursing school in a big city. That said they focused on some significant weaknesses we have and improvements that need to be made. We have been putting in a lot of work based on their recommendations that day and now that the grade is final with more feedback there is more work to do. Please be praying for us as we implement these recommendations to the best of our abilities and specifically that we would be able to focus on those that will truly help our program improve and our students be better nurses when they graduate.
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