Identifying common learning outcomes for health: Celebrating diversity and maximising benefit from regulatory necessity

Dear Sir

Australian higher education is transitioning to a new regulatory and quality assurance environment. A stronger focus on academic standards and discipline-specific graduate learning outcomes is accompanying this change. Although individual health disciplines have well-established standards monitoring through professional accreditation, a unifying framework to capture learning outcomes for the purposes of demonstrating compliance with higher education standards was needed.

Through the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Learning and Teaching Academic Standards project, six threshold learning outcomes for health discipline graduates have been identified (O’Keefe et al., 2011). These outcomes were derived from individual professional accreditation competencies/standards of 26 different Australian health disciplines. They represent the capabilities/competencies that every graduate of an Australian health degree program will possess. The range of disciplines represented is of particular note as some complementary and alternative medicine disciplines are represented together with veterinary science. The common theme linking all these disciplines is a shared purpose around the health of individuals, animals and/or populations.

There is immediate utility in identifying a set of common learning outcomes for health. Australian universities offering a number of different health qualifications can now use a single reporting framework to demonstrate compliance with the recently legislated Australian Qualifications Framework. In addition, as the threshold learning outcomes are based on the professional accreditation standards/competencies of each individual discipline, it is possible to directly link the reporting required by professional accreditation councils with the compliance requirements of the newly established national regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. This single set of learning outcomes based on professional standards also provides potential for academic standards monitoring across the full range of health disciplines to occur in a way that recognises and preserves disciplinary diversity.

Perhaps the most exciting possibility arising from this work is the opportunity to support greater interprofessional collaboration and educational innovation across the full range of health disciplines for mutual benefit of students, teachers and those for whom we provide care.