Abstract
Context: Health departments have various unique needs that must be addressed in preparing for national accreditation. These needs require time and resources, shortages that many health departments face.
Objective: The Accreditation Support Initiative's goal was to test the assumption that even small amounts of dedicated funding can help health departments make important progress in their readiness to apply for and achieve accreditation.
Design: Participating sites' scopes of work were unique to the needs of each site and based on the proposed activities outlined in their applications. Deliverables and various sources of data were collected from sites throughout the project period (December 2011-May 2012).
Setting/Participants: Awardees included 1 tribal and 12 local health departments, as well as 5 organizations supporting the readiness of local and tribal health departments.
Results: Sites dedicated their funding toward staff time, accreditation fees, completion of documentation, and other accreditation readiness needs and produced a number of deliverables and example documents. All sites indicated that they made accreditation readiness gains that would not have occurred without this funding.
Conclusions: Preliminary evaluation data from the first year of the Accreditation Support Initiative indicate that flexible funding arrangements may be an effective way to increase health departments' accreditation readiness.