Understanding Standard A Citations

Welcome again to the Massey Consulting Blog as I continue my series, looking into the ten most commonly cited ARC-PA Standards on the SSRs of PA programs. Last week, we began examining Standards A1.02a and A1.07, and today, we’ll dig a little deeper and examine why these are such commonly issued citations.

Nuances of Compliance

Standard A concerns the institution’s responsibilities for all sub-standards listed. These citations occur when:

1. The application, including the self-study report, is insufficient. 

2. The sponsoring institution demonstrates a lack of provable oversight for the PA program in question in the areas of:

   1. Verification of the program’s description in the application;

   2. Curriculum planning (includes published processes for institutional curriculum evaluation and approval);

   3. Program and personnel assessment (availability of institutional assessment and instructional resources); and

   4. Institutional support and resources for appropriate course and program evaluation as evidenced by the program’s compliance with C1 standards.

3. The PA program needs more staffing/faculty resources, or the staffing/faculty requires more time to conduct assessments within the program.

4. More responses and follow-ups are needed for action plans that address these deficiencies.

5. The sponsoring institution needs to display more oversight over the PA program, which would help ensure that the PA program is compliant.

Note that this citation can be, and often is, added at the Commission level. 

During a site visit, the senior administration of your sponsoring institution is interviewed. If that senior administration shows a lack of knowledge, no interest in oversight or assessment within the PA program, or simply states that the program is responsible for maintaining its own standards, the site visitors will see these responses as inadequate.

Why are citations so common? 

Standard A1.02a 

Standard A1.02a non-compliance has a greater scope of reasons behind it than the usual fare. This is because noncompliance may have roots in entirely different causes. Noncompliance can stem from your program’s lack of recordkeeping, from the insufficient performance of your sponsoring institution’s administration, simply from the fact that ARC-PA is paying more attention than ever, or your SSR is already troubled by numerous citations. Let’s break these reasons down more carefully.

• Programs with multiple citations, especially throughout Standards A, B, and C, will receive this citation frequently because multiple citations indicate that institutional oversight is lacking.

• The program may lack minutes verifying that institutional officials were involved in reviewing the application or the program’s assessment process. As has been the case with many other common citations, if you don’t have minutes to verify that your program has interfaced with institutional officials, even if they have been actively involved with reviewing the application and the assessment process, you are deemed not to be in compliance. ARC-PA wants documentation.

• Recently, ARC-PA has increased its emphasis on institutional support. This lowers the threshold for grinding citations within the standards. 

• Senior administration often needs to increase its understanding of the Standards.

Standard A1.07

These citations have more to do with adequate staffing of your program. They are commonly issued because:

• Institutional workload policies may not be compatible with maintaining internal committee service. Required heavy workloads do not permit your faculty and staff any time for assessment, especially if you’re not well-resourced.

• Likewise, senior administration may not understand the complexity of the day-to-day running of your PA program, resulting in severe understaffing and overloaded faculty.

• Overworked and overstretched faculty and insufficient staff create a domino effect that results in citations within standard A1.07. Having insufficient numbers of people on board affects everything else, and levels of quality suffer.

Even if program faculty and staff numbers fall within the PAEA benchmarks, the program's complexity could require more faculty and staff. The PAEA staffing benchmarks are good data commonly used by PA programs. However, we should not use it as a sole data source for staffing, merely as a guideline. 

PAEA’s benchmark numbers do not reflect the complexities of your program. Your program’s approach could differ from another’s based on your location or clinical year sites. There may be more general complexity, such as the extra oversight required by programs with distant campuses. Benchmarks will only get you so far. Measure what you need inside your program.

In my next blog…

Now that we’ve examined the reasons for the commonality of Standard A citations, we’ll move on next week to look at the language of these citations to pinpoint what specific support or data is lacking in your SSR.  Please join me then.