Specialised Health Promotion

 

Collaboration Action Plan

Future plans

Achievements to date

Infrastructure

  • A Project Team and wider Stakeholder Forum have been established, supported by the Royal Society of Health
  • Funding has been secured from the Department of Health in 2006/07 and 2007/08
  • The website www.specialisedhealthpromotion.org.uk has been set up and maintained by the Faculty of Public Health
  • A database has been developed, of some 500 staff
  • An e-network group has been set up via the Faculty of Public Health website, www.fph.org.uk

Recognition and identity

  • The Royal Society of Health has offered to be the ‘organisational home’ for specialised health promotion staff (in Wales in association with SHEPS), and has launched a subsidised Licentiateship category of membership for health promotion staff (see www.rsph.org.uk)
  • Highly-successful national conferences were held in the autumn of 2006 and in December 2007
  • Communication has been maintained through presentations at conferences, articles in journals and newsletters; a special issue of the Royal Society of Health’s journal in September 2007 was devoted to health promotion
  • A Health Promotion and Community Well-Being: Organisation and Partnerships Award is under development

Career Pathway

  • The Skills for Health/Public Health Resource Unit Public Health Skills and Career Framework offers the opportunity to agree a recognised career pathway, the lack of which has been repeatedly raised by the workforce
  • The Career Pathway for specialised health promotion suggested by the Career Framework is:
    • Assistant/Associate Practitioner (entry level for trainees in the specialised workforce)
    • Practitioners
    • Senior Practitioners
    • Advanced Practitioners
    • Consultant Practitioners
  • The Career Framework includes competences for health improvement, which can be used as the basis of competence frameworks for specialised health promotion staff at the different levels
  • In due course, the Faculty of Public Health may be able to offer a prospective training pathway for specialised health promotion practitioners

Health promotion academics network

  • The Royal Society of Health has offered to host the health promotion academics network

Regulation

  • Specialist-level regulation is now offered through defined registration with the UK Public Health Register, and some senior staff are benefiting in England from nationally-funded top-up training
  • In due course, the UK Public Health Register should be able to offer registration for specialised health promotion practitioners, which will recognise standards of fitness to practise and also empower the workforce

Future plans

Communications and advocacy

  • A position paper setting out: the importance of the workforce, the Collaboration’s work programme, issues concerning PCT reconfiguration and the impact of budget cuts, and a proposed career pathway drawn from the Public Health Career Framework, has been prepared for submission to Ministers and Chief Medical Officers and a meeting will be sought with them. It will also be circulated to Directors of Public Health and other organisations.
  • The collaboration project team will assess the feasibility of holding another 1 day conference in 2008.

Professional Support

  • The collaboration is drafting an Ethical Framework for the specialised health promotion workforce in partnership with SHEPS Cymru. This work will build on comments put forward during a consultation and views discussed at the meeting of the Shaping the Future Stakeholder Forum on 22 January 2008.
  • The collaboration will continue to develop the Health Promotion and Community Well-Being: Organisation and Partnership Awards. Guidance has been developed with input from PCTs and 6 PCT sites are currently piloting the scheme. Evidence will be submitted by the end of March and a peer review meeting scheduled for 9 May.
  • The collaboration has identified the need for more work and debate amongst the workforce on the theory and practice of health promotion. Whilst the work programmes concerned with the Public Health Skills and Career Framework should ensure that the workforce development issues were acted on, it is recognised that some work might be valuable to review theory-into-practice on empowerment, community participation, health literacy, social marketing, and ‘settings’ theory.

Practitioner Standards and Regulation

  • Links with the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUPHE) accreditation programme will be maintained and developed. The Public Health Career Framework will give us competences for health improvement, on which specific competences for specialised health promotion can be based. We will link these competences to the proposed European accreditation scheme being developed by the International Union for Health Promotion and Accreditation (IUHPE) for which the UK may be a pilot site.

 

 

This conference is a joint initiative between the Royal Society of Health and the Faculty of Public Health and the UK Public Health Register and The Institute of Health Promotion and Education