WILLMAR -- It will be eight years before the Ridgewater College nursing program is reviewed again for accreditation.
It doesn't get much better than that, said Lynn Johnson, director of the college's nursing programs in Willmar and Hutchinson.
The college was notified earlier this month that the program had qualified for continued accreditation from the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission. Some schools' accreditation is renewed for five years and others for eight. Ridgewater was considered qualified to go eight years between renewals.
The accreditation comes as the result of long hours of self-evaluation and a series of meetings and tours last spring.
"This is really a team effort, and I have the most awesome team," Lynn Johnson said last week. "How hard they've worked is what has made us successful."
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Several faculty members gathered with Lynn Johnson returned the compliment.
At a workshop several months ago, said instructor Faith Johnson, speakers talked about the things nursing programs should be doing. "We had already done them," she said, and they credited that to Lynn Johnson's leadership.
The accreditation puts Ridgewater in some rare company. The college has been accredited in its associated degree program since 1998 and in its licensed practical nursing program since 1974. Just seven other associate programs and three other LPN programs are accredited in Minnesota. Most of them are in the metropolitan area.
While it's a point of pride for the faculty to be associated with an accredited program, students are the ones who will truly benefit, they said.
"They are ready to articulate to a (four-year) program," said Faith Johnson.
Some four-year programs aren't interested in students with two-year degrees from non-accredited schools, she added. "This is huge for our students."
Instructor Alice Feichtinger said a student who had come to register last week said she chose Ridgewater because of its accreditation.
Nurses from accredited programs are also more attractive to employers, they said. More than 90 percent of the nurses graduating from Ridgewater programs stay in the area.
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"We know we are educating people to provide nursing care in our area," Lynn Johnson said.
Faculty members like instructor Julie Buntjer and Director of Simulation Jeanne Cleary are Ridgewater graduates. "We have grown our own faculty," Lynn Johnson said.
Accreditation is a voluntary process, but it requires a major commitment on the part of the faculty and the school, she said.
Before the accreditation team visited in March, Lynn Johnson and the faulty prepared a self-evaluation document that's more than an inch thick. It provides a comprehensive look at a variety of aspects in the program, including curriculum, policies and outcomes for students.
"This is a self-awareness journal," Lynn Johnson said, laying her hand on her copy of the report.
The faculty members said the self-evaluation was helpful to them. "It gave us all a much better focus," Cleary said.
"For those of us working on our (advanced) degrees, everything falls into place with what we did here," Feichtinger said.
One of the visiting evaluators told her that they weren't looking for a flawless program, Lynn Johnson said. Rather, they wanted to find a program that could recognize its challenges and was working to improve.
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The evaluators met with non-nursing faculty, nursing students and nursing program alumni. They toured clinical training sites used by the program, from Rice Hospital in Willmar to smaller clinics in area communities.
Ridgewater participates in the program voluntarily, but it is a major commitment of time and money for the college, Lynn Johnson said. The accreditation requires the college to maintain the level of its technology and to keep up with new developments in the field.
One of the most recent developments for the department is the SimNewB, an infant simulation mannequin that acts like a newborn. The NewB was just introduced in June, and Ridgewater has the first one in the state.
