The UNMC College of Nursing has expertise with nursing accreditation and invites current faculty to consider training as a site evaluator.
The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), a value-based accreditation body, models best practices in reviewing and assessing nursing programs across the nation. The UNMC College of Nursing currently has three site evaluators:
- Lepaine Sharp-McHenry, DNP, who has been a CCNE site elevator since 2014. She currently is on the CCNE Board of Commissioners and has served as secretary for the CCNE Board Executive Committee.
- Linda Herrick, PhD, who has been with UNMC since 2017. She has been a CCNE site evaluator for more than 20 years and has done more than 25 site visits. In 2012, she became a team leader for site evaluation teams. She was appointed to the CCNE Accreditation Review Committee in 2022 and was reappointed to a three-year term in 2023.
- Teresa Hulquist, PhD, who joined UNMC in 1988. She leads the college’s efforts for continuous quality improvement, has been a site evaluator with CCNE since 2016, and has conducted more than 12 site visits.
As a site visitor, you are the “eyes and ears” of CCNE, and you have the privilege to be invited into other schools or colleges of nursing to validate and verify the work institutions are doing to support the profession through their stated missions: education and/or research, service and practice. As a site reviewer, your role is to confirm what the program presented in its self-study with the data included in documents shared during site visits, and information shared from community members, clinical facilities, faculty, staff and students as compared to the CCNE standards and elements.
Drs. Sharp-McHenry, Herrick and Hulquist recently attended CCNE Evaluator Training in Orlando, centered on the new 2024 CCNE Standards, which will become effective Jan. 1, 2025. Dr. Hulquist will invite nursing faculty to participate in upcoming webinars that introduce the new standards.
Being trained as a site reviewer provides the foundation for your practice as a data gatherer, assessing the program’s quality and effectiveness. If you are a faculty member interested in learning more, let us know; we’d love to talk with you.