FORT KENT — The University of Maine at Fort Kent Nursing Program has received full five-year unconditional National League for Nursing accreditation, the culmination of three years of effort on the part of UMFK nursing personnel.

“I am just delighted,” said Mary Mullaney, chairman of the UMFK Division of Nursing, after her return from New York City this week and the meeting of the 12-member NLN Board of Review.

“The (NLN) board voted unanimously to grant the accreditation,” she said. In addition, the board lauded UMFK’s program on several areas.

Mullaney said the board praised the program’s curriculum as “outstanding” and commended “our choices of clinical sites as creative and conducive to learning.”

UMFK’s nursing program began as an extension of the University of Southern Maine program in 1981. During that time, the program operated under the umbrella of USM’s national accreditation.

In the summer of 1988, the UMFK program disaffiliated from USM, and members of the nursing division have been working toward national accreditation ever since.

In November 1989, the campus came under the scrutiny of the NLN, when a two-member visiting team arrived to study the program. In anticipation of the visit, members of the nursing faculty prepared a “self-study” describing in detail all aspects of the program.

Mullaney said the UMFK program prepares “generalist nurses” with a rural health care background. She said members of the NLN board “were amazed that our students were trained in a small rural area and then went on to be highly successful in large metropolitan health centers.”

The NLN board also commented on the successful integration of the nursing program into the university’s liberal arts program. “They said the core curriculum at UMFK is outstanding and that the nursing faculty did a great job of incorporating the (liberal arts) core curriculum into the nursing major.”

Mullaney is quick to praise the faculty in her division and the other members of the UMFK faculty for the program’s success. She said that without the support of the Fort Kent community and Northern Maine Medical Center, the program could not have come as far as it has.

Receiving NLN accreditation was extremely important to UMFK’s program, she said. “No nursing program can exist without NLN accreditation.” She said the UMFK nursing program would have to get reaccredited after five years but that “the most difficult part is the initial entry.”

With this accreditation, UMFK becomes the only campus with a nationally accredited baccalaureate nursing program in northern Maine. “The NLN accreditation was a dream and now it has become a reality,” Mullaney said.

In looking back over the nine-year history of the program, Mullaney said she felt great satisfaction that the program is standing on its own. “Now we belong to ourselves and to the people of northern Maine.”