Lippincott Professional Development (LPD) has received the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) Premier Accreditation Award for the second year in a row. As the Executive Director of Continuing Education at Wolters Kluwer, I accepted the award and was accompanied by Sherry Ratajczak, MSN, CPNP, Senior Clinical Editor and Janet Thomas, MSN, RN-BC, Manager of Continuing Education Accreditation & Compliance at Disney’s Coronado Spring Resort, in Lake Buena Vista, FL during the ANCC Continuing Nursing Education Symposium. We thanked ANCC for this prestigious award and expressed our appreciation of ANCC’s acknowledgement of the leadership and innovation that the team of nurses at LPD has brought to the field of nursing to improve nursing practice through key professional development activities and to share our best practices through presentations, publications, and mentorship. 

The ANCC Primary Accreditation criteria have been a foundation for our processes in planning, implementing, and evaluating professional development activities. While ANCC upholds quality standards, its flexibility allows for more broadly defining professional development and continuing nursing education activities in a time when we find that similar accreditation boards or state boards in other health care professions, have set narrow standards for what qualifies for continuing competency or continuing education credit. In fact, some have only allowed online continuing education in the last 5 years. With the flexibility that ANCC allows, LPD can better meet the learning needs of nurses by testing and exploring new types of activities including: virtual journal club, point-of-care learning, and interactive cases. We are currently exploring innovative and creative ways of delivering and measuring learning which would not be possible without ANCC’s recognition of continuing nursing education credits from a variety of professional development formats. LPD is taking our activities a step further by measuring how our activities impact nursing practice and patient outcomes by working with partners in health systems to collect data that links to the learning objectives of the continuing nursing education activities and measuring outcomes using quality data reported to government agencies. 

In addition to nurses with advanced degrees in the clinical editor and nurse planner roles, LPD has the internal resources including instructional designers, website designers, artists, and a videographer. This group continually examines our teaching methods and learning designs to make a difference in clinical learning. We also have an expanding pool of talented nurse experts who are in practice in dozens of specialties who spend the time delving into the latest research to keep our learning materials current.  

We are extremely motivated by winning the ANCC Premier Accreditation Award to continue to test new technology to support learning. Also, our goal is to further improve our evaluation processes to have even better ways to demonstrate improvement in nursing practice and the quality of patient care. Most of all, we not only strive for excellence, we truly enjoy the work we do at Lippincott Professional Development and each have a personal and professional commitment to the quality of work we publish.