Accreditation

Rather than a story about accreditation elsewhere, I'll share our current progression from provincial to national accreditation.

Our site visit is imminent.

While regulation is standard in 4 provinces for Registered Massage Therapy, BC is the only province to have accredited Massage programs. Our governing body has previously held this role and for 10 years the provinces have been working towards a national agreement with a separate accrediting body. April of this year that happened. While being anticipated for 8 months previous, we were ecstatic when the agreement was finally official.

There are many benefits to accreditation. I'm going to focus on two relevant in my situation.

The process itself builds a greater awareness of what, when and where material is both taught as well as examined.

In our profession, FOMTRAC is the accrediting body who uses the Inter-jurisdictional Competencies Document as it's core requirements. Clicking the link provided will take you to a fun video explaining about how the competency document can be used by students and institutions.

Through the process of coding I became aware of a chunk of material I taught but did not examine. Most educators can think back to a time when students commented that they studied, but nothing they studied was on the exam. I realize now, this should be a warning flag that the competencies are not being adequately represented in comparison to the emphasis by which we teach it.

This accreditation process has assisted in drawing each instructors attention to the areas where e are lop sided, or omit including the full range of material on exams.

The second benefit for us is we are able to relax the intensity by which we challenge the students in term 4. Most regulated provinces, in fact all, base a 2,200 hour base that they deliver their material from. In BC, we came from a 3 year, 3,000 program. As I navigate the schedule, I can say with confidence, our school continues to delivery the material at 2,651 hours, and by term 4 the volume is a heavy weight on our students.

This accreditation process will allow us to continue to meet the competencies but reduce the repetition of the extra hours (found only in our province) by 220 hours, bringing us much closer to our counterparts.

I am very excited for our site visit, as this will be one big step closer to a new sustainable program that is in the best interest of our students mental health.

Accreditation is a wide spread review of policies and an intense scrutiny of curriculum. It also enhances our ability to teach at a level of excellence. I'm all for it!