It is with mixed emotions that I inform the membership that the ACDN national committee made the hard decision at our recent meeting to disestablish and no longer offer an accreditation programme. As you may be aware the numbers of applicants have been dropping for several years. We currently have just 29 nurses holding accreditation and I expect that this number will drop over the coming 6 - 12 months as people who are due to submit a maintenance accreditation portfolio make the decision to not do so. We introduced a new process about 6 years ago to try and make it easier to achieve accreditation, but this resulted in very little change in the numbers of applications. The plan, as discussed at the AGM in May, was to introduce another new process next year, but after a lot of discussion the committee made the decision that this would also be unlikely to change the numbers. As a result, the process is no longer cost-effective and so we decided to disestablish the programme.

This decision has not been made lightly, but I believe it is a pragmatic response to the changing times.

I want to thank the entire assessor team, our moderators and our NZNO admin support, both past and present, for everything that they have done over the years. The assessor team has been incredibly committed to the process and given a huge amount over the years, usually in their own time and for that I thank them.

I also want to thank those of you who have been strong supporters of accreditation over many years, some from the time of inception of accreditation. Without you we wouldn’t have had an accreditation programme at all.

Bryan Gibbison
Coordinator – ACDN (NZNO) Accreditation Programme
bryan.gibbison@aotearoadiabetescollective.org.nz