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5NEWS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA
Accreditation and Institutional Quality Assurance Process:
How to kill two birds with one stone
W
e describe an important development for
Occupational Therapy Programs in On-
tario: the potential to combine professional
accreditation by the Canadian Association of Occupa-
tional Therapists (CAOT) and the university’s Institutional
Quality Assurance Process (IQAP) carried out on behalf
of the provincial Ontario Universities Council on Quality
Assurance.
Since its inception at the University of Ottawa, IQAP
was open to the possibility of harmonizing professional
accreditation reviews with its cyclical program reviews,
but limited guidance on how to proceed was available. In
2014, Paulette Guitard volunteered to become the Faculty
of Health Sciences’ representative on the Graduate Pro-
gram Evaluation Committee (GPEC), to champion the
unique assessment needs of professional programs.
In 2015-2016, the OT programwas up for both accred-
itation by CAOT and cyclical review by IQAP. Dr Guitard,
who was the OT program director at the time, formally re-
quested preparation of a single self-study for both
processes, and exploration of the possibility of combining
other aspects of the two evaluation processes.
GEPC favorably received this request and expressed
interest in combining the two required evaluation visits.
Discussions between the OT Program, the CAOT Aca-
demic Credentialing Council (ACC) and the university’s
Quality Assurance Office were initiated to identify com-
mon ground and launch a pilot project. First, GPEC com-
pared CAOT’s Accreditation Standards with the IQAP
assessment criteria. The professional standards were
judged both strong and complete, and more explicit and
well defined than the IQAP criteria in some respects, a
very good sign for the potential to combine the two
processes!
While Dr Guitard withdrew from voting on combining
the evaluations, her participation in related discussions
was instrumental in helping other GPEC members gain a
deeper understanding of the issues surrounding accredi-
tation and how they related to cyclical program review.
From the discussions, three main issues emerged: 1)
the written reports 2) the criteria for the choice of evalua-
tors, and 3) the planning of the site visit.
1) The completed CAOT self-study documents were sent
to the university’s QA office. The GPEC’s gap analysis con-
cluded that while the material was organized differently
from the IQAP template, it nonetheless contained all the
essential elements required for cyclical reviews. GPEC
therefore voted to accept the self-study with no modifica-
tions as the IQAP self-study report. The OT Program for-
warded the assessment report of the on-site team to GPEC
which would serve as their external review report. The in-
ternal reviewer submitted a report as per normal proce-
dure which was shared with the OT program. Both
documents were reviewed by the GPEC as the material
on which to draw for the final IQAP report.
2) ACC does not require that all three on-site reviewers
have an academic background; indeed, one reviewer is
expected to represent the public. In contrast, IQAP re-
quested two external reviewers and one internal (from an-
other discipline within the University of Ottawa), all with
strong academic background. These differing criteria were
considered as follow:
a. Selection of ACC reviewers when done with the
IQAP requirements in mind can include two persons
with strong academic backgrounds. In our case, as
ACC reviewers were selected before the IQAP
process was fully integrated, this step led to some ne-
gotiation with IQAP to allow one reviewer with a less
traditional academic background, who nevertheless
had strong experience in accreditation of educational
programs.
b. The request to include an internal reviewer elicited
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