Identification of the role of oral health educators in elementary schools during COVID-19 pandemic: a competency framework

Objective Oral health educators should have the required knowledge, skills and attitude in order to meet the increased needs of the Ministry of Education in Syria as well as to perform their duties in promoting oral health in children appropriately during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study was undertaken to identify core competencies required for oral health educators in elementary schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative exploratory study was undertaken. A focus group which consisted of 5 Medical Education postgraduates and 3 oral health educators’ training team members were invited to formulate a preliminary list of basic competencies. Delphi technique was also adopted through inviting 12 experts in oral health education to evaluate and formulate a final list of elementary schools’ oral health educators’ competencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results A competency framework was developed. Fifty-five competencies were identified including 35 in cognitive domain, 12 skills and 8 attitude competencies. A list of essential competencies has been identified. These competencies should be addressed in training programs targeting oral health educators, which can consequently produce competent educators who can successfully promote and provide health care to all schoolchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Competency framework of school psychologists in Vietnam schools

A competency framework points out the requisite skills and knowledge of a particular occupation. A competence framework enables institutions to easily identify areas where remedial training may be required; thereby training quality and ultimately public safety could be improved also. This study was conducted to build up a competency framework for school psychologists in Vietnamese. 91 school psychologists, lecturers, and psychologists from Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong Province, Long An Province, Vinh Long Province, Can Tho Province in Vietnam participated in the survey process. The findings of our study showed that the competency framework for school psychologists in Vietnam includes three main components: (1) professional knowledge, (2) counseling skills, and (3) attitude and moral qualities.

A Six-Step Model for Developing Competency Frameworks in the Healthcare Professions

Competency frameworks are developed for a variety of purposes, including describing professional practice and informing education and assessment frameworks. Despite the volume of competency frameworks developed in the healthcare professions, guidance remains unclear and is inconsistently adhered to (perhaps in part due to a lack of organizing frameworks), there is variability in methodological choices, inconsistently reported outputs, and a lack of evaluation of frameworks. As such, we proposed the need for improved guidance. In this paper, we outline a six-step model for developing competency frameworks that is designed to address some of these shortcomings. The six-steps comprise [1] identifying purpose, intended uses, scope, and stakeholders; [2] theoretically informed ways of identifying the contexts of complex, “real-world” professional practice, which includes [3] aligned methods and means by which practice can be explored; [4] the identification and specification of competencies required for professional practice, [5] how to report the process and outputs of identifying such competencies, and [6] built-in strategies to continuously evaluate, update and maintain competency framework development processes and outputs. The model synthesizes and organizes existing guidance and literature, and furthers this existing guidance by highlighting the need for a theoretically-informed approach to describing and exploring practice that is appropriate, as well as offering guidance for developers on reporting the development process and outputs, and planning for the ongoing maintenance of frameworks.

The Journey of Uplifting: First Ever Petroleum Development Oman Corporate Digital Competency Development Program

With capability training becoming ever important, our Pilot in-house developed and run program during COVID-19 delivered a comprehensive digital learning ecosystem which enabled participants to develop their digital skills and competencies. The digital learning journey empowered Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) staff to become ambassadors working in collaboration to enable their department digital plans. Building on international best practices, uplifting our engineers to become data scientists will drive direct business value in an efficient decentralized manner and cater for the ever-growing demand for digital transformation. As PDO embarks into the digital world, the program offered participants customized learning paths enabling them to utilize technology to optimize their daily operations, increase efficiency and effectiveness. Also the program enabled staff to get hands-on exposure to digital projects and what other companies in the sector add a practicing in the space of digital transformation. Hence, participants have built the required digital muscle and competencies to drive PDO digital agenda and bring value to the business. With the vision of promoting and pioneering our talent and organization as future ready, the program played a vital role in reshaping PDO's image in coping with the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VOCA) working environment. The program started as a pilot project covering a specific number of PDO staff to build their digital competencies and experiment with various learning paths and tools. Also, the program focused on on-boarding their managers into the program to fully understand the added value of launching a 19 week program with diverse approaches to build their staff's skills. Moreover, one of the key goals of the pilot project is to test various mentorship and coaching approaches to ensure higher completion rates from all participants and cater for their technical challenges. As PDO working towards corporate digital strategy, the program is paving the way to build a robust training and competency framework, a task force capable of driving change and forward looking plans. With the successful results of the pilot, replication of the methodology and maturing the program is now being taken by PDO Information technology department to corporately build digital muscle within PDO value chain. As a result of participants' first pilot project and implementation posts evaluation assessment, the management endorsed the launch of cohort 2 for the program tackling a bigger number of staff and expanding the range of competencies to tackle in the areas of data science, machine learning and personal intelligence. One of the key learnings which was implemented in cohort 2, is building a comprehensive stakeholder map and alignment plans to ensure the right path of corporate scale beyond and benefit a bigger audience within the corporate. For example, multiple workshops and engagement sessions have been done with PDO Learning Academy and technical coaches in different departments to match the outcomes from cohort 2 and the aspiration of PDO building digital competency framework. In addition, PDO digital competency development program has aspired to build an ecosystem within the organization and in collaboration with external stakeholders like universities, e-learning platforms and technical partners to ensure sustainability of such initiatives and their scalability beyond PDO. The program sparked many conversations within the ecosystem to build collaborative teams and joint task force to investigate how we can build digital competencies for our staff and as well for startups to encourage growth from various aspects.

Integrated Teaching Competency Framework for General Education Program: Suggestions and Recommendations for Natural Science Teachers

This article investigated the general structure of teaching competencies and integrated teaching competencies of natural science teachers in high school education, the actual situation of integrated teaching in Vietnam and some other countries in the world, and the designing of assessment templates to recognize difficulties of natural science teachers in integrated teaching. It is shown that natural science teachers are facing various challenges in integrated teaching: a lack of professional knowledge and skills in building integrated topics and teaching with this approach, problems in putting integrated teaching techniques into practice. On this foundation, the article presents a procedure for building an integrated teaching competency framework for natural science teachers, then proposes such a framework. This framework consists of 4 competencies and ten criteria with detailed indicators. Natural science teachers can use this framework to develop tools (checklists, rating scales, or questionnaires) to assess their integrated teaching quality and their “colleagues”, henceforth fostering their competencies as required by the General Education Program.

Competency-Based Education: Developing an Advanced Competency Framework for Indonesian Pharmacists

Introduction: Pharmacists need to be adaptable, flexible, and capable of advancing their practice to adapt to rapidly changing population health needs. We describe an educational approach to pharmacy workforce transformation in Indonesia through an advanced practice competency framework development using an “adopt and adapt” methodology.Methods: The competency framework development process comprised a translation phase, an adopt and adapt phase, validation through a nationwide mapping survey, and a completion phase through leadership consensus panels. We conducted a forward-backwards translation of a previously validated Advanced to Consultancy Level Framework (ACLF) to yield the Indonesian Advanced Development Framework (IADF) draft. The subsequent adoption and adaptation process was conducted through a series of consensus panels. We validated the IADF through a nationwide workforce survey. The final phase included leadership consensus panels with the professional leadership body in Indonesia. We analyzed the qualitative data thematically and the quantitative data using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) technique.Results: We identified conceptual challenges in adopting and adapting the existing ACLF, which were addressed by providing a national glossary and concrete examples. A total of 6,212 pharmacists participated in the national workforce survey, of which 43% had <2 years of post-license (post-registration) experience. The MCA results showed that practitioner self-assessment to the IADF could discriminate their career development stages. The results also indicated a four-stage career model (including early years career training). Embedding this model in a structured national training program will enhance the professional workforce development through a more structured career journey.Conclusions: We describe the first validation of an advanced competency development framework for the pharmacy workforce in a non-Anglophone country, showing the possibility of transnational applicability of this framework. We argue that this methodology can be used in Low and Middle-income countries (LMICs) for the more rapid advancement of pharmaceutical care practice.

Development of a career and competency framework for Occupational Health Nurses working in New Zealand using participatory action research

<p>This participatory action research (PAR) study was undertaken to review the New Zealand Competencies for Practising as an Occupational and Environmental Health Nurse (2004) document and develop an integrated career and competency framework for nurses working in the field of occupational health. The 2004 competency document needed to be reviewed to ensure Occupational Health Nurses (OHNs) have up-to-date guidelines for the skills and knowledge required by businesses to support and promote the health and wellbeing of the workforce, as well as enabling OHNs to identify their training requirements and career planning. Eight OHNs (including myself) from Christchurch over a 10-month period applied a PAR approach to this qualitative study. The nurses actively engaged in the project from research design to dissemination so linking theory and practice. Achieving the aims and objectives required collaboration, democratic participation, joint decision making, sharing resources, gaining knowledge, and empowerment. The study had six phases. Recruitment of the OHNs occurred during the first phase and in the second phase information was collected through a questionnaire gaining awareness of the OHNs role within the workplace. This information stimulated the first action cycle inquiry. During the third phase data was collected from transcripts of the PAR group meetings. The fourth phase was reflection of the PAR theoretical process of the study. This reflection included understanding what occurred leading to the turning points and what sustained the PAR group. From this phase, evolved phase five, formation of a sub-PAR group, and phase six of the study when the original PAR group reconvened and four subsequent meetings were held concluding the study in May 2015. The study provides contribution to PAR by showing importance of the time commitment of homogenous co-researchers, and role of primary researcher. A number of areas were identified by the nurses as important skills and knowledge areas for occupational health nursing. Areas include fitness for work, health promotion, risk assessment, legislation and standards, leadership and management skills, research and professionalism. These skills and knowledge topics were then expanded and applied into the career framework from competent to expert nurse. The final participatory cycle involved distributing the framework to the New Zealand Occupational Health Nurses Association to complete the review. The outcome of this research is an integrated occupational health nursing competency and career framework which has been disseminated nationally to New Zealand OHNs waiting for feedback. It is expected that the framework will raise the profile of OHNs within New Zealand, and the vital contribution they make to the public health strategy and supporting businesses to apply employment legislation.</p>