When a health department decides to pursue national accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB), leadership makes a bold commitment to accountability, performance management, and community excellence. Yet behind every agency’s pursuit of that gold seal stands an Accreditation Coordinator (AC), a professional handed one of the most complex, high-stakes project management portfolios in local government, often with no formal roadmap.

I know this reality firsthand. Since 2010, I have served as a public health consultant navigating the accreditation ecosystem. Like nearly everyone in the field, I was never formally trained in PHAB accreditation. There was simply no school or standardized credential for it. I had to learn on the job through trial, error, and intuition, synthesizing frameworks from continuous quality improvement, organizational change management, and formal project management to build systems that worked.

Over years in the field, I saw the exact same script playing out across health departments:

• At one health department, the AC was an epidemiologist for whom coordination was tacked on as a secondary duty. When the agency eventually secured funding for a dedicated coordinator, they hired a promising staff member transitioning straight from an internship who had to learn the entire process on the fly.
• At another agency, the coordinator was likewise a new staff member transitioning directly from an internship into the complex machinery of evidence collection.
• At a third department, the coordinator was an experienced health policy analyst. Despite deep subject-matter expertise in health policy, the granular mechanics of PHAB measures, e-PHAB submission guidelines, and document forensics had to be acquired from scratch on the job.
• At two other agencies, population health specialists were asked to absorb accreditation coordination into already demanding operational roles.

These vignettes represent the untold story of public health accreditation. Brilliant, dedicated professionals are routinely thrust into the coordinator seat without structured onboarding.

Research confirms that this ad-hoc model is unsustainable. Studies examining accreditation demonstrate that a designated coordinator is essential to keep teams on track and navigate the multi-year evidence lifecycle. However, peer-reviewed and gray literature underscores that agencies frequently lack the resources for dedicated, experienced personnel, forcing coordinators to split their bandwidth across primary clinical, epidemiological, or environmental roles. When documentation processes are held together by informal institutional memory rather than standardized workflows, agencies face severe friction, administrative cost inflation, and vulnerability to staff turnover.

We cannot expect public health agencies to transform their performance when their designated leaders are left to reinvent the wheel.

This is the imperative behind AccrediQI Academy.

AccrediQI Academy was created to replace trial-by-fire learning with structured, competency-based education. By translating PHAB Standards and Measures Version 2022 into applied project management pacing, audit-ready evidence curation, and cross-departmental engagement strategies, the Academy equips coordinators with the operational mastery they need on day one.

Accreditation coordination is not merely an administrative chore; it is a specialized public health leadership discipline. It is time our workforce training reflects that reality.