ANCC Accreditation Criteria Review: Educational Design Process 7 (EDP7)

Whether you are an accredited provider such as i3 Health or you are an educational partner working with an accredited provider, it's still important to understand the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) criteria that underlie nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) activities. This is part of a periodic series of posts looking at what each criterion means in general and what it might mean for you.

The third set of ANCC accreditation criteria focuses on the educational design process (EDP) of the activities within an NCPD program. Educational design includes the planning, design, assessment, and evaluation of each activity. There are seven (7) criteria within this section. The seventh and final criterion in this group focuses on how evaluation data is used.

Criterion EDP7 states:

How the summative evaluation data for an educational activity are used to analyze the outcomes of that activity and guide future activities.

I was talking to a colleague about evaluations one day. She was describing how her program collects evaluation data. I asked about how she analyzes the data, and she responded with a shocked, "We're supposed to do something with it?!?"

That is what this criterion is about. You put on an activity. You collect evaluation data. And then you do something with it.

There are 2 goals for how evaluation data is used. One is to determine the impact of the activity. What were the outcomes? What impact did it have?

The second goal is to develop your program based on what you have learned. Does the evaluation show a practice gap that you hadn't previously identified? What other educational interventions might you be able to start planning based on what the evaluation results show?

While this is a simple concept, it does take work in practice. A provider unit with a small staff needs to make sure that the time required to analyze data is accounted for.

It is also important to note that this criterion does not require all of your activities to show that they met your desired outcomes. It asks that you use your evaluation data to determine whether or not it did. When trying to meet this criterion, a program isn't judged on what the evaluation shows as long as the analysis was done to get results that show something.

Hopefully, using evaluation results to drive future program is already a process you have in place. If so, meeting this criterion is a simple matter of describing how you do what you do.

Other Posts in This Series

ANCC Accreditation Criteria Overview

Organizational Overview 1 (OO1)

Organizational Overview 2 (OO2)

Structural Capacity 1 (SC1)

Structural Capacity 2 (SC2)

Structural Capacity 3 (SC3)

Educational Design Process 1 (EDP1)

Educational Design Process 4 (EDP4)

Educational Design Process 5 (EDP5)

References

ACCME (2022). Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education. Available at: https://www.accme.org/accreditation-rules/standards-for-integrity-independence-accredited-ce

ANCC (2021). Writing to the ANCC NCPD Accreditation Criteria Self-Learning Guide. Available at: https://www.nursingworld.org/~4b0217/globalassets/docs/ancc/manuals/ancc-2784-ncpd-writing-to-the-ancc-criteria-final-v-1.0-9.27.21.pdf

ANCC (2021). ANCC NCPD Accredited Provider Applicant Journey Guide. Available at: https://www.nursingworld.org/~4b0217/globalassets/docs/ancc/manuals/ancc-2530-ncpd-applicant-journey-toolkit-final-v-1.0-9.27.21.pdf