Health Professions Council: SETs guidance consultation

HPC document: Standards of Education and Training guidance for education providers

The Federation welcomes the input from professions to the consultation document.

Detailed comments are:

Page 4: ‘When you are developing your programme, you may also wish to refer to documents published by other organisations which take a role in developing and fostering good practice, e.g. professional bodies, and the Quality Assurance Agency.’

We would also recommend suggesting in this section that education providers talk to professional bodies prior to drawing up a course, particularly around curriculum content and professional accreditation and support. Close working between education providers and professions will be vital in ensuring the effectiveness and success of future courses. Although there is a section on Working with Professional Bodies on page 5, it does not give a strong steer on the need to link with professional bodies.

Standard 3.5 on the experience and qualifications of staff should also include a sentence on the need to keep current with professional body guidance and meetings activity, to ensure that the teaching establishment is kept up to date. Standard 3.6 could then strengthen the reference to evidence of recent updating in professional portfolios, to underline the importance of maintaining links to current and developing practice.

Set 4, page 25 under Overall Guidance refers to professional body involvement in curriculum setting. This section should strongly recommend proactive discussion with professional bodies, who will increasingly become involved in curriculum discussions where they are not at present. The danger of providing a list of publications is that this will not be current or reflect recent developments, so contacting relevant professions directly is also vital. Standard 4.2 requires the above in order to show that it has been met, and the wording at the beginning of the second sentence should be strengthened to: ‘Professional bodies should be involved in …’ Standard 4.4 requires contact with professions to be effective, and this should be stated in the standard.

Standard 4.7: we welcome the development of multi-professional education and the stress on the need to ensure that this enhances, and does not detract from, delivery of the relevant professional curricula

Set 5: Practice Placement Standards – the introduction should contain a reference to the benefit of working with professions to deliver effective practice placements. There is a role for professions to input to the accreditation of training placements, and many do so already. This role should be recognised and made use of – it is referred to indirectly in standard 5.2 and should be brought out in the introduction to this section of the document.

28 April 2006
Dr Keith Ison, Chairman Federation for Healthcare Science

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