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Review of the Preventative Health Workforce in Australia.

 

 

Development of Tasmania’s Suicide Prevention Strategy .

 

 

 

Evaluation of administrative processes for community based grants under the National Binge Drinking Strategy.


 

 

 

Aboriginal Early Childhood Oral Health Project – Capacity building approach and development of training resources.

 

 

Re-thinking and shaping a public health workforce for the future workshop.

 

 

 

The Unique contribution of Public Health Physicians.

 

 

HR for Small Businesses.

 

 

 

Aboriginal Health Worker professional Review.

 

 

 

Pharmacy Workforce Planning Study Update.

 

 

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research > The Unique contribution of ........

 

The Unique contribution of Public Health Physicians

The public health workforce was once an almost exclusive domain of medically qualified professionals. In the last few decades an explosion of opportunity for training in public health has resulted in many new entrants to the public health workforce from non-medical practitioner backgrounds. Those who might be categorised as specialist public health physicians are now a minority within the total public health workforce.


In this increasingly diverse and multi-disciplinary public health workforce the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine sought to describe:


• What experience and competencies specialist public health physicians bring to the public health workforce that persons of other discipline backgrounds cannot easily (or at all) emulate; and
• The unique contribution to public health work that public health physicians can provide.

The key objectives of this project were to:

• Clarify current expectations of the role of the public health physician within the public health system and the non-government sector;
• Describe where this expectation is currently well expressed through job positions / descriptions that contribute to appropriate, effective and efficient public health work;
• Potentially identify new areas of public health practice where public health physicians could contribute; and
• Identify the unique contribution of physicians to public health work.

The methodology for the project included:

• Collection and analysis of over 100 position descriptions of position currently occupied by public health physicians within Australia;
• Twenty critical incident interviews with public health physicians;
• Interviews with senior line managers;
• Analysis of data (from the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Physicians and Australian Institute of Health and Welfare); and
• Review of international and national literature on current public health physician workforce.

The Final Report for this project was completed with the assistance of the Advisory Group members in July 2010. Initial feedback on the Final Report has been extremely positive and HCA looks forward to seeing any outcomes which may arise out of the report’s future directions.

 

Unique contribution of Public Health Physicians [download the report]

 

For more information on this project please contact us