Steering Commission

About the Steering Commission

OSAP-DANB-DALE Foundation Infection Control Certificate/Certification Steering Commission (ICCCSC)

Mission

To promote the health and safety of the public and dental healthcare personnel by providing guidance that reflects OSAP’s, DANB’s and the DALE Foundation’s missions in the development and implementation of assessment-based certificate and professional certification programs developed to provide and reinforce knowledge and measure cognitive knowledge-based competence in infection prevention and control and safety (IPCS) in dental healthcare settings.

The ICCCSC role includes:

• Serving as liaison to three organizations’ Boards of Directors providing autonomy in decision making over essential certification activities; because of accreditation requirements;
• Advising the Boards on marketing and communications, intellectual property protection, legislative monitoring, fundraising and any other relevant related topics;
• Providing representation from the certified population as well as a member of the public;
• Maintaining appropriate separation between certification and any education or training functions to avoid conflicts of interest and to protect the integrity of the certification program;
• Ensuring sufficient financial resources are available to conduct ongoing, effective and sustainable certification and recertification activities;
• Identifying primary personnel responsible for conducting certification activities, their roles and qualifications, including oversight and monitoring of those personnel; and
• Establishing panels of qualified subject-matter experts to provide insight and guidance and to participate in exam development and scoring processes, including but not limited to job analysis, item writing, standard setting, statistics review and other examination development activities.

Accreditation

The OSAP-DANB-DALE Foundation Collaboration is developing its education and credentialing programs to meet the accreditation standards of the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE). For example, the Steering Commission has been organized in compliance with the requirements for governance and autonomy.

The Collaboration will apply for ICE accreditation of the OSAP-DALE Foundation Dental Infection Prevention and Control Certificate Program™ after collecting sufficient learner data required to make application for this accreditation.

Following launch of the two new certification programs, once the required number of individuals meet eligibility requirements, test and become certified, OSAP and DANB will apply to the ICE’s National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) for independent accreditation of the DISIPC and CDIPC certification programs. The NCCA accreditation standard evaluates professional certification programs in many areas, such as responsibilities to stakeholders, assessment instruments (with special attention paid to the appropriate use of nationally accepted psychometric methodologies for job analyses, item and exam development, statistical evaluation and standard setting), certification and recertification and maintenance of certification program accreditation. In time, OSAP and DANB will consider pursuing accreditation to the international ISO/IEC Standard 17024.