Buffering the Stress of Programmatic Accreditation

Accreditation, a public measure of program quality, is essential in today's competitive higher education environment. State board of nursing prelicensure program approval and a program's reputation are affected by the accreditation decision of a nursing program-accrediting agency. Writing the accreditation self-study and hosting the program site visit are often stressful experiences for the nursing program administrators, faculty, and students involved in these processes. The Neuman Systems Model can be used to objectively develop protective buffers for the stressors associated with programmatic accreditation. Three example scenarios that were developed to describe interventions, based on the Neuman Systems Model, to buffer and reduce the stress of the accrediting agency's processes are presented. The scenarios do not represent any specific nursing program but were created based on the experiences and questions of faculty members and academic administrators.