Over the last 15 years, one of my main goals has been to ensure that CEPH participates as a positive and responsive partner with the public health academic community to improve educational quality in accredited schools and programs. In fact, the founders of CEPH envisioned the agency as being more than just a “regulator;” our Articles of Incorporation specify two purposes.
There are, of course, some activities provided for in the Articles that we simply will not do, for example, certification of individuals is off limits – the same agency doing the accreditation and certification would be a clear conflict of interest (they didn’t know this in the early 1970s).
One of the main ways that we contribute to the second goal is through our educational programming. We have built it over the years. When I became the executive director in 2005, we were doing only one, face-to-face site visitor training each year. Back then, we let program directors and deans attend that training whether they would ever be a site visitor or not because there was no other available offering for them to learn the accreditation process. In the following years, we added the Accreditation Orientation Workshop for staff and faculty undertaking the accreditation process, Technical Assistance Sessions in conjunction with the APHA Annual Meeting, webinars, and finally, this year, our first day-long conference, the Accreditation & Education Forum.
Early this year, due to improved collection of attendee and evaluation data, we conducted our first comprehensive summary evaluation of our educational offerings in calendar year 2018 and I wanted to share some of the highlights.
We had another fantastic year of programming in 2019, culminating in the Forum in November and we are already looking forward to 2020. If you have ideas for future programming, send them – and we’ll see you at a future event!
Written by Laura Rasar King, EdD, MPH