Best Practice Pathology Collection in Australia

Objectives: The specific objectives of the study were to (a) identify current best practice in pathology specimen collection and assess the extent to which Australian pathology services currently satisfy best practice standards; and (b) identify training and other strategies that would mitigate any gaps between current and best practice. Methods: A total of 22 case studies were undertaken with pathology collector employers from public, not for profit and private pathology organisations andacross urban and rural locations and eight focus groups with pathology collection services consumers were conducted in December 2012 in four different cities. Results: The preferred minimum qualification of the majority of case study employers for pathology collectors is the nationally recognised Certificate III in Pathology. This qualification maps well to an accepted international best practice guideline for pathology collection competency standards but has some noted deficiencies identified which need to be rectified. These particularly include competencies related to communicating with consumers. The preferred way of training for this qualification is largely through structured and supervised on the job learning experiences supported by theoretical classroom instruction delivered in-house or in off the job settings. The study found a need to ensure a greater proportion of the pathology collection workforce is appropriately qualified. Conclusion: The most effective pathway to best practice pathology collection requires strong policies that define how pathology samples are to be collected, stored and transported and a pathology collection workforce that is competent and presents to consumers with a credible qualification and in a professional manner. Abbreviations: CHF – Consumer Health Forum of Australia; KIMMS – Key Incident Monitoring and Management Systems; NAACLS – National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences; NACCHO – National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation; NPAAC – National Pathology Accreditation Advisory Council; RCPA – Royal College of Pathology Australasia; RTO – Registered Training Organisation

Child-centered food systems: reorienting food systems towards healthy diets for children

Current food systems are failing to guide children towards healthy diets. This paper presents a tool to identify the actions needed to reorient food systems to become more child-centred from a nutrition perspective. To connect the dots between children's lives, their food environments and food supply systems, the tool takes a child-centred, food systems approach. Comprising six methodological steps, the tool starts by measuring and understanding children's realities and then working back up into the system to identify how food environments and supply systems could make relevant foods more or less available, affordable, appealing and aspirational in the contexts of children's lives. The paper spells out the mix of methods needed to make this assessment, gives examples of the data and studies already available and type of insights they provide, and discusses the methodological challenges and gaps. It presents a worked example that shows how following these steps in sequence enables the identification of a package of actions that can act coherently to reorient food systems in the way most likely to have impact on child malnutrition

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review

© 2017 The Authors - Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.We gratefully acknowledge support of the UK Natural Environ-ment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC) who funded this work in the context of‘Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery’(CVORR)project (Grant No. NE/L014149/1)

The Competencies Needed by Health Sector Information Quality Advocates

Objectives:  1) To introduce to expert colleagues the concept of health sector information quality advocates. 2) To obtain these colleagues opinions on worth of the advocate role and the competencies needed by an advocate. 3) To identify existing courses that matched the needs of the advocacy role. Design:  1) A workshop and pre-workshop survey of participants. 2) An online search of courses targeting a health workforce audience based on key words from the competencies identified by the workshop participants. Setting:  The workshop was conducted at the 35th Patient Classification Systems International (PCSI) Conference in Iceland in September 2022. The pre-conference online survey used SurveyMonkey. The online course search used Google Chrome and Google Scholar and the English language. Main outcome measures: 1) Agreement of expert colleagues on the need for an Information quality advocate role. 2) Consensus by the expert colleagues on the important competencies. 3) The identified courses described in terms of mode of course delivery, course cost and duration, the delivering institute and key competencies covered. Each course was assessed and scored on a scale from 0 to 10 based on comprehensiveness and effectiveness. Results: The top five competencies for the information quality advocate in order of importance were data governance principles, quality management, stakeholder engagement, information and system governance, and information culture. The online search results identified many courses for specific technical roles, but most did not have the focus on data validity, reliability and information usefulness that matched the needs of the advocacy role. Conclusions: Focused training is needed to support appropriately skilled information quality advocates for the health sector. The presence of information quality advocates at the point of data collection facilitates the pathway to best practice in data collection

Career Pathways for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workforce: Secondary Data Workforce Report: Career Pathways Project

Data sets and data collection: The method for this component of the broader mixed methods study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Career Pathways consists exclusively of undertaking descriptive statistical analysis of existing data. The limitations of using secondary data sources, particularly when unit record data is not available for re-analysis, are acknowledged. Accordingly, specific inferences from the findings are limited, and the findings ultimately need to be considered in conjunction with the findings from other study components. Five main sources of data were explored as follows: • ABS Population Census data interrogated by Aboriginality, age, gender, occupational classification, industry classification and educational level • Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) data was used to provide an insight into the age and gender composition of the current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student population and future entrants to health professions • Data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) includes relevant course enrolments and course outcomes (graduations) from VET level courses • The Commonwealth Department of Health (Workforce Branch) holds data on of all the processed annual workforce surveys of registered professions • Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) holds data from an annual survey of Aboriginal community-controlled services receiving Commonwealth funding to deliver primary health care and other services. They are required to contribute to the Online Services Report (OSR) annually. Current situation: In the last twenty years there has been impressive growth in the absolute number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the health workforce. The growth rates average 4.7% per annum. These are much higher workforce growth rates than the total general workforce population. Whilst only accounting for approximately 20% of the total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce, employment growth in ACCHSs for the last 10 years (AIHW, 2017a) has contributed significantly to total growth. Despite the significant growth in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce, this analysis has revealed that there has been no real improvement in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander proportion of the total health workforce (and especially as yet the health professional workforce). Of thirty five health occupations reviewed, only six occupations had an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce proportion of the total workforce that was equal to or greater than 3% (equivalent with the total population proportion). Equally discouraging has been a lack of change in the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. lack of change in the proportional representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the total health workforce appears to be primarily due to an equally rapid growth in the non-Indigenous health workforce. The lack of change in the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce per the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is attributed to a significant increase in the number of persons identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, against which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health worker participation has only just kept pace. Factors facilitating career development and advancement: There has been significant growth in enrolments in, and graduations from, health-related higher education and tertiary education courses. This growth in education activity has clearly helped fuel workforce growth in general, but particularly in certain health professions where the initial base number was very low (e.g. pharmacists, physiotherapists and medical imaging professionals). The overall increases in the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in the health sector is helping potentially to create a “critical mass effect”. This effect will assist in reducing the influence of culturally unsafe workplaces acting as a barrier to future aspirants wanting to enter health professions. The presence of greater numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in particular professions also provides a larger pool of appropriate mentors and career coaches to help newer entrants survive and prosper. Policies and practices to nurture and optimise the value from these professional critical mass populations (through structured mentor programs, appropriate training and remuneration) will be important. Factors impeding career development and advancement? A disproportionate amount of recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce growth has been in low status and lower paying jobs (such as personal care workers). These jobs tend to have ‘shorter’ salary scale structures that terminate at comparatively low-end points with poor articulation to other roles particularly roles in professional careers. The preponderance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce growth in occupations with poorer career progress prospects is strongly influenced by what sectors of the health industry in which employment is occurring. More employment growth has happened in residential care, personal care and some primary health care industry sectors where there are limited career progression opportunities, as opposed to employment in the hospital sector where career pathways, because of greater workforce sizes and more hierarchical organization structures, tend to be longer and provide greater career progression opportunities. The workforce in these jobs nevertheless represents a potential population to be rapidly developed to assume health professional careers. They have existing health work competencies and health industry understanding and can have significant motivation to progress. Policies and practices to realise the potential of this population require going beyond local initiatives and require structures that cross individual organization boundaries to provide quality practice supervision, career coaching and access to education that is more than study leave. Other influences Opportunities for employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the health workforce seems to vary by jurisdiction (some States have better employment outcomes), by the profession / occupation (several health professions seem to be doing better than most others), by sector in which employed (the Aboriginal Community Controlled sector is a greater employer of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders compared with the Government or private sectors) and by location of employment (which compared to the non-Indigenous workforce favours rural and remote settings). These influences can be both positive or negative to career progress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the health workforce

The importance employers attach to employee qualifications

No description supplie

What value do Australian employers give to qualifications?

Lee Ridoutt, Chris Selby Smith, Kevin Hummel, Christina Cheang look at how employers value and use qualifications in their business decisions. Their research indicates clear differences in the value placed on and use made of qualifications by employers for different groups of workers and occupations. Qualifications are considered more important for higher-level occupations and employers use them predominantly to recruit new employees and to ensure regulatory compliance. Employers regard qualifications as a signal of potential for future learning and skills acquisition, not as a signal of immediate competence. Overall, employers drew a strong distinction between qualifications and experience, and favoured and valued the latter more in regard to many of their business decisions. The higher the level of enterprise change and innovation, the lower the level of value and use made of qualifications by employers. Also, small enterprises are more likely to be highly discriminating of qualifications and supporting development among their employees

The place of recognised qualifications in the outcomes of training

Lee Ridoutt, Kevin Hummel, Ralph Dutneal and Chris Selby Smith identify the relationship between requirements of particular jobs and, in the opinion of employers, formal qualifications. A large number of competencies were identified by employers as required for jobs to be performed well. Generally, this was significantly in excess of those needed to obtain a qualification at an Australian Qualifications Framework level appropriate to the job