Community of Support Issue - October 2024

The ACEN is very excited to share its new strategic plan for 2024-2026! It is a plan that focuses our goals and priorities on actions that enable the ACEN to continue to be a global leader in nursing education accreditation and clearly outlines our commitment to organizations seeking ACEN accreditation, ACEN-accredited programs, nursing educators and administrators, and ACEN volunteers. Having a clear and focused strategic plan is an organizational best practice as it creates a vision to align both internal and external stakeholders and enables an organization to allocate its resources to achieve the desired outcomes.

This new strategic plan was created by the ACEN Board of Commissioners in January 2024. The plan has four strategic priorities:

• Enhance program support and satisfaction
• Engage and support our dedicated peer evaluator volunteers
• Promote the importance of ACEN accreditation; and
• Build a growth model for accredited nursing education programs.

The Board also created a new vision statement that reflects our commitment to excellence in accreditation and a new tagline that demonstrates the value of accreditation in elevating educational excellence. The vision is positive, forward-thinking, and demonstrates our own commitment to continuous quality improvement.

Vision: ACEN’s vision is to be the global standard in nursing education accreditation by fostering excellence through continuous improvement, innovation, and advocacy.

Tagline: Elevating Educational Excellence Through Accreditation

Over the past months, the ACEN leadership team has taken the vision of the Board and operationalized that vision into several actions that you have already started to see. For example, one action that has been recently implemented is our new Site Visit Report (SVR) template. The new SVR was created in response to the feedback from our peer evaluators that the documentation burden was very heavy. With our strategic priority of supporting our peer evaluators, the Accreditation Services team jumped into action and created an SVR template that is user-friendly and more efficient, yet still captures the information needed to document compliance with the ACEN Standards and Criteria. Another example of putting the strategic plan into action is our new annual customer satisfaction surveys. Annually, the ACEN is surveying our candidates, our accredited programs, our nurse administrators, and our peer evaluators to assess our areas of strength and, even more importantly, to identify where we have opportunities to improve. We want and need regular feedback to determine how we can allocate our resources to better meet the needs of our stakeholders. We can only get better when we listen to our customers and respond to their ideas. The most innovative and pragmatic solutions come from those at the frontlines, and we are committed to keeping the lines of communication open!

Over the upcoming months, you will continue to see actions that align with our strategic plan. It is our roadmap that drives everything that we do. It is our North Star. It is our litmus test. It is our commitment to the ACEN global community, and we are very proud to share it with you!

If you have any feedback regarding our new strategic plan, our priorities, or anything else that you want to share, please reach out to me directly at kchappell@acenursing.org.