Organisations that employ people working in health promotion play an important role in ensuring the quality and integrity of the health promotion workforce. Health promotion registration is a strategy to demonstrate and reinforce your commitment to health promotion, ensuring that your workforce meets key health promotion core competencies.
Benefits of having a registered health promotion workforce:
- Workforce quality: Registered health promotion practitioners have met internationally agreed professional standards, confirming their competence to work in the field. This helps maintain and enhance the quality of health promotion practice.
- Integrity: Registration establishes a clear professional standard for the workforce, enhancing the maintenance of a high level of integrity in health promotion practice.
- Legitimacy: Registration adds legitimacy to the practice of health promotion, as the registered workforce has attained a level of competence that reinforces the value of health promotion as a profession.
- Credibility: Registration provides credibility, not only for individuals but also for the organisations. This can enhance stakeholder engagement, thus increasing the potential impact of health promotion initiatives.
- Continuous Professional Development (CPD): Registered Health Promotion Practitioners are required to complete CPD activities, thus maintaining currency of health promotion practice.
- Perceived and real increased value to the organisation: Having a registered health promotion workforce maximises quality, enhancing the reputation and positive impact of the organisation.
- Recruitment assistance: Registration provides practical recruitment assistance, offering an additional measure by which to assess potential candidates and the competency they would bring to the role.
How can employers support their workforce to become registered?
- Encourage and support registration by allowing employees to use work time to draft their registration applications and alert them to the information and resources available on the AHPA website.
- Include registration as a desirable key selection criterion in position descriptions.
- Incorporate a review of the achievement of core competencies into annual performance reviews, so employees recognise that the pursuit of registration is an integral part of their role.
- Where an employee does not meet the core competencies, provide professional development and on-the-job opportunities to facilitate competence.
- In some cases, an employee may not have the required amount of work experience to be able to apply. Provision of continuing employment where feasible will support future eligibility.
- Once registered, support the achievement of the 75 hours of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) required over three years by providing aligned opportunities for learning and development.
- Support employees in identifying work examples for each of the core competencies, for example, through team brainstorming workshops.
How to become registered
AHPA provides detailed step-by-step instructions on how to apply for registration here.
Further information