August/September 2009: Healing Touch ... - Energy Magazine

Healing Touch Program Pursues Accreditation:
Demonstrating Professionalism, Delivering Value
by Jeff Benson
Given today’s wide array of health care providers,
it is often unclear which programs adhere to
recognized standards for delivering quality outcomes.
Accreditation is one approach in which
organizations and programs can clearly demonstrate
to health care consumers and other stakeholders
their commitment to accepted standards
of practice.
This article focuses on the accreditation plans of Healing Touch
Program (www.healingtouchprogram.com) and emerged from
an interview with Janna Moll, an active contributor to the Healing
Touch community as practitioner, speaker, teacher, certification
reviewer, mentor, and Ethics Committee Chair. Janna is
also President of Energy Medicine Specialists (www.energymedicinespecialists.com),
a leading consultancy on accreditation
and other topics in the field of energy medicine.
First, what is accreditation Fundamentally, accreditation is a
voluntary process that provides public visibility on whether an
organization meets recognized standards of performance.
Readers may have first encountered accreditation as it related
to a college, university, or professional school they attended.
Post-secondary education organizations in the US and several
other nations choose to undergo regular accreditation reviews
of their programs and institutions.
According to the Distance Education and Training Council
(www.detc.org), a leading US-based voluntary, non-governmental,
educational organization that operates a nationally recognized
accrediting association, “Accreditation in education began
over a century ago. The movement started as a public reaction
to the extreme differences between educational institutions that
initially appeared to be similar. Accrediting bodies were voluntarily
organized by educators to develop and implement common
policies and standards to measure educational quality.”
The health care industry has a long history of adopting accreditation
as a means of conveying levels of performance relative to
established standards and to implement ways to continuously
improve. In the US the American College of Surgeons first set
standards to define suitable hospitals for surgical training in
1917. These efforts developed into a program of standardization
for multiple disciplines, and in 1951 led to the formation of
the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health care Organizations
(JCAHO), today known simply as the Joint Commission
(www.jointcommission.org).
Among other leading health care accreditation organizations
are the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE)
for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (www.
aacn.nche.edu), the National Commission for Certifying Agencies
(NCCA) of the National Organization for Competency Assurance
(www.noca.org), and others. Healing Touch Program is
currently pursuing accreditation via the NCCA.
The NCCA “helps to ensure the health, welfare, and safety of
the public through the accreditation of a variety of certification
programs/organizations that assess professional competency.”
The NCCA follows a peer review process to:
* Establish accreditation standards;
* Evaluate compliance with these standards;
* Recognize organizations/programs which demonstrate
compliance; and
* Serve as a resource on quality certification.
Accreditation is a recognized and accepted process to insure
that an organization will provide the quality of education according
to established standards. As such, the entire energy medicine
field stands to benefit from these higher standards and offers
genuine benefits for the Healing Touch Program community.
continued on page 20
copyright © 2009 Healing Touch Program August/September 2009 | Energy Magazine 19