who keeps the folder
Three consultants, one folder at a time.
Every Herzing IRB folder that comes through the desk is kept by three people: one who makes the determination and writes the plan, one who builds the most-returned pockets, and one who moves the site letter, files the submission and answers the board. Each owns the pockets she knows best, and the whole folder is read by all three before it goes anywhere.
Annika Brandstetter
DNP, APRN
Lead consultant — determinations and the plan
Annika makes the category call on every file that comes through the desk and writes the plan the application will quote. A nurse practitioner by training whose own doctoral project went through a practicum site and a board, she has read more QI-or-research designs than she can count, and she will tell you plainly which door yours walks through — before the board does.
She reads the design, not the cover page: whether anything randomises, generalises beyond the site, or is meant to be published as research findings. From that call she writes the plan in the words every pocket will later quote, and names the review path it points to and why. When a folder arrives already returned for its category, she is the one who rebuilds the argument for the honest door.
Annika also keeps the practice's reading of Herzing's current IRB handbook and portal, so that anything named in a plan is named the way the board names it.
Olivia Tremblay
MSN, RN
Consent, instruments, data security
Olivia builds the most-returned pockets in the folder: consent forms and recruitment materials version-matched to the application and pitched at the people signing, instruments and interview guides word for word as they will be asked, and data-security answers with a name on every blank. Her pockets do not come back.
Her background is bedside and unit-level quality work, which is where most Herzing MSN and DNP projects live, and she writes consent the way a participant reads it: what happens, in plain words; what is collected and from whom; that declining or leaving costs nothing; who to contact. She keeps every document at one version and takes superseded drafts out of the folder herself.
Olivia also checks the CITI pocket for everyone named on an application — course, modules, currency, and the certificates themselves placed in the folder.
Helen Marsh
PhD
Site letters, submissions, board replies
Helen drafts the site permission letter for the signatory's hand, files the submission, and answers every reply the board sends until the approval arrives. If the practicum site is the slow one, she is the one who moves it.
Her doctorate is in a social-science field and her working life has been spent on the administrative side of research — coordinating studies, preparing and tracking submissions, and writing the replies that close a file. She writes the site letter so that it says what a reviewer needs it to say — the site's letterhead, an authorised signatory, the data named — and she writes revision responses point by point, in the board's own vocabulary, re-filing each document version-matched.
Amendments after approval and continuing-review materials are hers as well; in Full Handover she carries the file to the end.
How the three read one folder
The pockets are owned, but the folder is shared. Before anything is filed, each consultant reads the whole folder the way a reviewer will — for completeness first, then for quality — and the discrepancies a second reader finds are the ones that would have come back as findings. A sample that drifted by two between the plan and the form, a recruitment channel that appears in one document and not the other, a consent version the application does not cite: those are caught here, not at the board.
It is also why the practice never under-sells itself as a document check. The free application review is the entry; the work is the entire process, tab by tab, and the three of them carry it together until the approval is in your hands.
What they never do
None of the three designs the study, collects the data or authors the findings. The research is yours and stays yours; what the team builds is the folder the board reads, so the board reads your project and not your paperwork. And none of them speaks for the board — its decisions are its own, and the practice is not affiliated with Herzing University or its IRB.
The application desk
The chat in the corner of every page is kept by two more consultants, on alternating shifts. Ask them which pocket to open first; if the answer needs the folder, they will ask you for it.
the other tabs in this file