AHP Career Frameworks

National Workforce Competences have been developed to assist with the development of the Allied Health Professions Career Framework – and in the broader context to contribute to key strategic drivers for change, namely:

• Achieving the best possible standards of healthcare
• Enabling staff to develop their skills to fulfil their potential
• Enabling health organisations to better plan services & workforce development
• Recognition of competence irrespective of location, sector or setting.

A National Workforce Competence is a description of what individuals need to be able to do and know to be able to carry out a defined work activity. Each competence reflects a function that needs to be carried out to meet a given need and can be performed by an individual practitioner. The competence describes the quality of outcomes that an individual’s work needs to achieve to meet best practice expectations. A collection of these competences (functions) can be combined to reflect individual roles or team roles across a wide range of contexts.

Skills for Health works with practitioner groups to develop competences, beginning with the patient needs and exploring what has to happen to meet those needs. The competences then provide a reference point for planning patient pathways as well as practitioner roles. The development process draws on published standards, as well as inputs from professional bodies, practitioners, managers and other stakeholders; to ensure that each competence is transparent, objective and transferable across all four nations of the UK Skills for Health recognises four different types of competence.

1. Generic competences apply equally to all UK work sectors – for example competences describing management or learning and development functions
2. Other competences are Common – they apply to all healthcare roles, and to some social care roles, but do not apply to sectors beyond that – for example competences describing interactions and relationships with patients
3. Yet other competences are Shared in that they apply to a subset of roles/practitioners in some contexts only, for example those relating to the planning and provision of treatment and care.
4. Lastly, some competences are Specific to a given context, setting or patient group and would not be relevant beyond that, for example those relating to perioperative or neonatal care.

Competences are not assigned to specific levels - a role on any level of a career framework will involve performance of functions at different levels – specialist areas being at higher level and other functions being at lower levels. A review of the competences on the website, will illustrate how the overall framework provides some similar, but not identical functions. Each individual should select those competences that reflect their overall pattern of work activity and competences may be clustered in different combinations to represent actual practice.

For example, the assessment of individual patients may involve the following competences (functions) dependent on the context, patient condition and other factors involved in a given situation:

Responds to referrals of individuals with health conditions 
And/or 
Prioritise treatment and care for individuals according to their health status

Take a Presenting history
And/or 
Undertake routine physiological measurements

Assess an individual with a suspected health condition
And/or 
Assess individuals with long term conditions

The map is in three sections:

Section 1 lists the titles of competences that reflect functions identified as likely to be performed by all Allied Health Professions. These competences would be selected in various combinations for individual practitioners as illustrated earlier in this document; no one practitioner would ever be expected to be competent in them all.

Section 2 lists the titles of those competences that may be applicable to some Allied Health Professions but not to all. These competences are not necessarily exclusive to Allied Health Professionals (AHP); some may also be relevant to other professional groups. As in section 1, the competences have been grouped in relation to broad areas of the patient pathway and, again, selection is needed since no practitioner would expect to be competent in them all.

Section 3 gives further information on other Generic and Specific competences that may be relevant to Allied Health Professionals.