...Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University
is seeking Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) Accreditation...

Since the Jiann Ping Hsu College of Public Health was founded all members of our community have been working diligently to become an institution that can earn what we call “sustainable accreditation” as a college of public health.   A few years back we began the collaborative process of revising our mission, goals and objectives (see link to this information on this website) to create an evaluation and quality assurance process capable of providing feedback that will move us toward our goals.  As a faculty, and with the help of our students and community advisors, we revised our curriculum.  It is now completely competency based and is designed to be effectively delivered and evaluated.  We were informed in October 2008 that our application to pursue accreditation by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) was approved!  Now we are deeply engaged in making progress towards earning CEPH accreditation.

The next big milestone as we move toward earning accreditation is to submit our “self study.”  When completed next winter this will be an extensive document that reports the results of our progress toward meeting each section of the CEPH criteria – the criteria that define a college or school of public health that has the quality and sustainability to earn accreditation (www.ceph.org ).  These criteria require us to examine and report on the sustainability of our institution, the quality of our academic programs, our efforts to recruit, retain and support high quality faculty and students and the service, research and workforce development contributions of our faculty to the profession of public health and our region.

During spring 2009, we conducted multiple meetings with faculty, administrators, students, community stakeholders and advisors from public health serving agencies who worked together to assess our progress toward meeting our goals and objectives.  Throughout the summer we examined these findings to determine our areas of strength and the areas where we need to invest more energy and/or resources.  At retreats this summer and fall we reconfirmed our goals, changed policy when necessary and developed additional feedback mechanisms where needed.  As the semester begins we are working as a large group and in multiple committees to organize and develop the narrative for our self study.  The core working group, Drs. Hardy (Dean), Fitzmorris (DrPH Director), Arroyo (MPH Director), Savage (Director of Public Health Research) and Tedders (Director of Public Health Practice), Nandi Marshall, MPH (Graduate Assistant) and Tamara Rosas (Staff Assistant), is chaired by Dr. Woodhouse (Associate Dean).  All JPHCOPH faculty, many students and members of the Public Health Practice Advisory Board or Adjunct Faculty are working on over twenty committees to develop the first draft of our document.  As the document development progresses, additional individuals who are not able to physically attend meetings will review sections and provide feedback/direction.

This is an exciting time!  We are simultaneously in the home stretch (after years of work we are putting the self study together and submitting it for review) and just beginning (moving toward what we hope to be a successful site visit in fall 2010 as per the procedures required by CEPH)!  Thank you to everyone for your support and guidance!  We look forward to working with you throughout this process.