Competencies in Health Promotion

So here’s an example of how we can get children to walk to school. You’ll note that none of these children are carrying big, big bags, sports bags, computer bags, and music. You’ll also note that there’s a person in a yellow shirt at the front. Now this is an activity called the walking school bus. Schools were concerned the children are not walking to school, but parents were concerned about that safety of their primary school children. So what they did is create a voluntary situation where volunteers helped to guide children and walk them to school and back home and they had a route where they walked around a community and children joined the group and then walked to school.

Before I move to the next section, I just want to reinforce again that we have competencies in health promotion. These competencies are quite unique. They combine science and art; they combine hard skills and soft skills. In this particular slide, which gets a little bit complicated, you will see on the left hand side a series of statements around competencies. What is it that a Health Promotion Practitioner is expected to be able to demonstrate? The minimum competencies are those baseline requirements to health promotion roles. What are all health promotion practitioners expected to be able to do? What are they capable of doing? How do they work efficiently and effectively in their field?

So there are discipline specific competencies as well as some particular competencies related to special areas of Health Promotion such as social marketing.

It’s really an important consideration because many people think they can do Health Promotion, but in actual fact, they don’t carry the skill set required. And this is an unfortunate condition because not everyone would think that they could be a doctor, or an occupational therapist or a nurse, so it’s worth recognizing that Health Promotion carries with it a range of competencies. And you can see some of those develop as I keep moving the slides through.

There are also then very specific knowledge and skill requirements that are associated with each of those competencies, and the competencies document goes on to talk about the fact that the way we demonstrate them is through a variety of performance criteria that again are specific to each scenario. So in this case, these competencies relate to being able to work with communities, to be able to engage with communities, to do consultation and collaboration. But there are a range of different competencies aware across a range of different criteria and I’ve just chosen these to illustrate that we combine both science and art, hard skills and soft skills in the process.