Licensure, Accreditation, Certification & Education

• Licensure: How a member of a profession is granted the ability to practice. State agencies and the legislature define advanced-practice nursing, decide who can prescribe and determine the requirements for licensure.
• Accreditation: The process of evaluating schools of nursing and their programs nationwide. Accrediting bodies have published essentials for advanced-practice nursing education.
• Certification: The evaluation of an individual’s knowledge, skills and abilities in a specialty. For most states, one component of advanced practice nursing licensure is certification. Licensure and certification, however, are separate processes.
• Education: Advanced practice nursing educational programs at the master’s, post-master’s, and doctoral levels.

The Consensus Model for APRN: Licensure, Accreditation, Certification & Education was an effort to standardize and clarify all of the above. The model defines advanced nursing practice, describes a proposed regulatory model, identifies advanced-practice titles, defines “specialty,” and describes how new roles and population foci might develop. It is a uniform model of regulation for the future of advanced practice nursing that is designed to align the interrelationships among licensure, accreditation, certification, and education (LACE).