EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Education and Training

Education and Training

Education and training services range from capacity building of officials and district managers and teachers for delivering primary and elementary education and technical and vocation education, developing software and providing hardware to improve teaching practices, developing curriculum and teaching material, to developing models for public private partnership and implementation of reforms.

In the past 2 years I have noticed that the Coalition Government proposed a new framework for workforce development in the health sector that commits to the delivery of “high quality education and training that supports safe, high quality care and greater flexibility”. As part of this commitment, it proposes an outcomes framework for workforce planning, education and training involving quality metrics, building on ongoing work on indicator development for commissioning non-medical and medical education and training.

There is an interest, at the Department of Health, to learn more about international experiences in the use of indicators to measure quality in education and training of the healthcare workforce, in particular the extent to which quality metrics, where used, asses issues around ensuring sufficient supply; excellence of training for the current and future workforce; the safe delivery of training with relation to patients, staff and trainees; as well as measuring the impact of training on patient experience, staff and learners; creating a workforce receptive to research and innovation; and value for money in healthcare training and education.

This brief part that provides a rapid review of the published evidence on initiatives undertaken at international and national levels that may inform the further development of the proposed outcomes framework (Kent-Walsh & Light, 2003: 25). It is designed as an exploratory review, with a focus on the use of quality indicators to assess and monitor the delivery of healthcare education and training in international settings.

Assuring and enhancing the quality of care should form the ultimate goal of high quality training but the available evidence of a direct association between the quality of healthcare education and training and the quality of care provided remains scant. Evidence that is available tends to be limited to specific fields. The academic literature is beginning to address these issues and future work should aim to systemically assess emergent evidence.

We find that there is increasing interest and activity, nationally and internationally, in the further development of the healthcare workforce to better meet the present and future needs of a changing healthcare environment. However, ...