FACHE Certification Guide 2026

The college publishes the sequence and the conditions under which candidates may test, and the examination is one element within an application rather than a standalone product. In practice the important planning point is that experience, references, education and service requirements are the slow parts, so build them in parallel rather than treating the examination as step one.

Yes. Chief nursing officers, chief medical officers and other clinician-executives pursue fellowship on the same terms, and the credential is common among them precisely because it evidences management competence that a clinical qualification does not. The experience requirement looks at executive responsibility, not at whether you came through a clinical route.

Roles carrying genuine management accountability within healthcare organisations — budget, personnel, service or strategic responsibility. Supervisory clinical roles and project positions may or may not qualify depending on their actual content. Because this determines eligibility, map your responsibilities against the college's published criteria rather than relying on job titles.

Because the college defines healthcare leadership as including responsibility to the community a provider serves, and it treats participation in healthcare and civic organisations as evidence of that. It is a genuine requirement rather than a decoration, and applicants who ignore it until application time find it is the component they cannot manufacture quickly.

Every three years Fellows demonstrate continuing education, continued employment in healthcare management and continued community or professional participation. It is not a re-examination. Fellows active in chapter, committee or educational activity generally satisfy it as a by-product of that engagement rather than as a separate project.