Listening to our Stakeholders - Health Workforce Australia

22 Listening to our Stakeholders:
Analysis of interviews regarding competency-based education and training & competency-based career frameworks.
Accreditation and regulatory authorities
Due to their roles and function across the whole of the Australian health workforce, the
accreditation and regulatory authorities possess detailed understanding and insights into
the competency-based education and training and career framework implementation status,
benefits barriers and issues.
Thus, this participant group was able to provide comment from whole of workforce, sub-sector
and profession specific basis.
The authors of this report suggest that the insights and active participation of the overarching
accrediting and regulatory authorities would be essential partnerships to successfully moving
this project forward.
Informants from the cohort of accreditation and regulatory authorities provide broad insights:
“The understanding of competence within education and training, their use of the terminology
is a bit of a concern to us because it seems to be fairly variant between competency,
competence, competencies and performance … so I think our view would be that there
needs to be some clarification of terminology because without that I think we’re going to
get misunderstandings and perhaps confusion and waste a bit of time to move these issues
forward.” Participant 23
“Nursing is a really good example and they’ve embraced qualifications - regulated,
competency based qualifications very early on which have enabled a clear career pathway.
When we look at some of the other areas, we don’t see there is much of a flow in dentistry
for example, where there are dental nurses and dental assistants but we can’t see a clear
pathway for a dental nurse to become a dentist.” Participant 26
Employers
During the process of semi-structured interviews, employers added significant additional
information to inform this project than that which was available in the published literature only.
Whereas other informants confirmed things present in the literature, employers were able to
contribute additional insights; however, some of this was then embargoed.
Employing agencies (including the major jurisdictions) tended to have a considerable amount of
un-published grey literature. Some of this was shared with the research team but some material
was embargoed with confidentiality constraints applied due to the potential industrial implications
of competency-based career frameworks which could be linked with pay scales.
All employers were using competency-based training in one form or another including the almost
universal use of this form of training within orientation and mandatory training programs.
Other involvement included partnership activities with the professional entities of clinicians within
their employ such as the use of the CanMEDS models by medical colleges during registrar
training rotations.
In contrast, most employers were actively exploring (rather than utilising) concepts associated
with competency-based career frameworks. Universally, employers were exploring multiple
mechanisms to enhance the flexibility, scope of practice and cost effectiveness of their health
workforce. The development of competency-based career frameworks was included within the
explorations described by employers.