Ideas@TheCentre
Separate training system fails Aboriginal people
The Aboriginal Health Worker role is an Aboriginal identified position, which means only people recognised as Aboriginal can train and work as Aboriginal Health Workers (AHWs). Approximately 1,000 AHWs are employed across Australia, but many more have completed or enrolled in AHW training. Of the 450 registered health workers in the Northern Territory in 2010, only 195 were employed.
Separate courses and career paths for Aboriginal people have a poor track record. Earlier this year, GenerationOne reported that many Aboriginal people are frustrated because training courses were not leading to jobs.
A major national review in 2000, ‘Training Re-visions,’ identified a number of problems with the training provided to AHWs. In particular, as no clear definition of the AHW role existed, training was ‘all over the place’ and lacked consistency and quality control. Each state and territory had its own training, resulting in differences in course development and delivery, even within regions, states and territories.
Two recent reports on AHW training - ‘The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker Project’ and ‘The Aboriginal Health Worker Profession Review’ - suggest that many of these longstanding issues remain unresolved.
Training for AHWs continues to be provided by Registered Training Organisations (RTO), who receive financial benefits to ‘get bums on seats’ but are not held accountable for poor outcomes.
The Batchelor Institute in the Northern Territory admits that its training program relies on local health services to provide clinical job training support. Some students end up working in clinics where this support is not available, preventing them from completing their training properly.
Despite these problems, the federal government has committed to ‘national registration and accreditation’ of AHW practitioners on 1 July 2012 under the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (APHRA).
However, a third of AHWs have no qualifications or have not completed training so they will not meet the new registration requirements. The government’s solution is to have two tiers of health workers – registered and unregistered. This approach risks confusing the health worker role further, not to mention the potential health and safety issues in having non-registered and untrained health workers practising medicine.
Like everyone else, Aboriginal people deserve to be treated by qualified and competent health professionals. It is also ludicrous to expect the least educated and most poorly paid health care workers in Australia to be capable of tackling some of the country’s most difficult and intractable health problems.
Sara Hudson is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of Charlatan Training: How Aboriginal Health Workers Are Being Short-changed, which was released this week.
