Competence Frameworks
Skills for Health is the Sector Skills Council (SSC) for the UK health sector. Its purpose is to help develop solutions that will deliver a skilled and flexible UK workforce in order to improve health and healthcare, including public health.
Public health professional organisations across the UK in collaboration with Skills for Health developed the Public Health Skills and Career Framework (PHSCF), which is designed as a tool for individuals at any stage of their career to identify a pathway for developing their skills either in their current post or with future career in mind.
The development of the PHSCF has led to the development of useful tools to help you understand the required competences* for practice. National Occupational Standards (NOS) provide benchmarks of performance, and the Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) describes the knowledge and skills that NHS staff (except doctors and dentists) need to apply in their work.
Notes:
These documents are detailed, and if you are not familiar with them and how to use them, you will find it useful to look at the Careers and Individual Skills Development pages on the Skills for Health website, and perhaps talk to your manager, mentor or a colleague with more experience.
* ‘Competence’ is used in a variety of ways. Here we define it as ‘the ability to perform an activity, or activities, to a required standard’. In the UK, the word has been used to refer to occupational standards of performance.