Quality Assuring Health & Wellbeing Content in Healthcare Education Curricula – an Innovative Approach

The Five Year Forward View calls for a radical upgrade in prevention and public health.  There is a challenge though in understanding how and what healthcare learners are currently taught with regards to public health knowledge and skills.  Therefore Health Education England (working across the North West) has developed a toolkit to allow programme leads for healthcare education programmes to consider, identify and map how their programmes evidence public health education knowledge and skills acquisition.

The purpose of the toolkit is to quality assure the undergraduate education curricula in the North West for public health content. The indicators were drawn from the Framework for Personalised Care and Population Health for Nurses, Midwives, Health Visitors and Allied Health Professionals which has since been update to the All Our Health document in June 2016. The toolkit draws on six key areas of population health activity - the first four are drawn from the four public health domains outlined in the in the public health outcomes framework of health improvement, health protection, wider determinants of health and healthcare public health. It includes a further two from the Compassion in Practice framework.

Why assess public health content in healthcare education curricula?

• To provide a systematic and common methodology for quality assuring undergraduate healthcare curricula to ensure a fit for purpose workforce that supports the delivery of the NHS 5 Year Forward View. HEE Public Health action plan,Public Health Workforce Strategy and HEE Mandate,
• To provide evidence of Higher Education Institution (HEI) plans to add and or improve public health content of the undergraduate health professions curricula.
• To ensure increased exposure to practice learning environments where public health outcomes can be met.
• To provide an evidence base to inform joint working towards improving health and reducing health inequalities through development of a common core approach to public health education for the undergraduate health and social care professional workforce.

Does it Work?

The toolkit has been developed and piloted successfully in the North West. View a case study outlining further information about the toolkit.

Sharing Resources

The toolkit is freely and widely available to all HEE Local Workforce Advisory Board areas and HEI providers and can be used as part of routine quality improvement processes between HEI’s and Placement Providers. The resource can be adapted to suit local needs and requirements.

Read more about the toolkit and implementation on the North West Centre for Population Health & Prevention Network website.

If you would like to discuss further please contact phpn.northwest@srft.nhs.uk

EXCEL VERSION OF TOOLKIT (use for data collection and monitoring)
PDF VERSION OF TOOLKIT (use as a reference guide)