Graduate Attributes for Master's Programs in Health Services and Policy Research: Results of a National Consultation

What distinguishes a health services and policy research (HSPR) graduate from graduates of related fields such as epidemiology or population health? What traits, knowledge and skills should HSPR training programs be sure to help all their students attain? Most readers will have ideas about how to answer these questions; however, we suspect those answers would vary considerably. HSPR is an interdisciplinary field – one that attracts people from a wide variety of backgrounds and shares somewhat blurred boundaries with related fields. This range would explain some variety in how people might envision HSPR graduates. Another reason for variation in answers to questions about the attributes of HSPR trainees is that, despite the many indicators that HSPR is maturing as a field of its own – the emergence of funding institutes, a national association, annual conferences and a dedicated journal – HSPR in Canada presently lacks a common definition of its core competencies. A clear definition of attributes that distinguish HSPR graduates would be helpful to educators, students and employers. It would serve the practical goal of communicating the abilities that employers can expect in HSPR graduates and that prospective students can expect to attain through HSPR training. Moreover, the process of exploring and delineating the field's unifying attributes can help improve our understanding of the role or purpose of HSPR (Pittman and Holve 2009), and in doing so, assist individuals in identifying themselves as members of the HSPR field – a potentially important outcome of advanced education (Lucia and Lepsinger 1999; Barnett et al. 2001). Several training centres have published lists delineating learning objectives for their students (Atlantic Regional Training Centre 2008; Ontario Training Centre in Health Services and Policy Research 2008; Western Regional Training Centre for Health Services Research 2008). While these lists represent important steps for the Canadian field as a whole, each was independently developed, varies in structure and content from the others and includes elements that may not be relevant for non-academic HSPR-related careers. American researchers have conducted two national consultations to determine core competencies for US doctoral programs in health services research (HSR) (Martin 2008; Forrest et al. 2009). By design, however, these lists of competencies were tailored for predominantly academic careers in the context of the US health system and related research and policy foci. This paper summarizes an extensive consultation with experts from across Canada that we undertook to identify desirable attributes to be developed through graduate training in HSPR. We began by seeking broad input on the “core competencies” of the field: the skills, knowledge and abilities that are keys to success in HSPR-related careers today and in the foreseeable future. We also sought input on how HSPR training could be improved to better prepare students for related careers. Our approach involved several stages of data collection and analysis, which we report in sequence here: a review of literature on competencies, graduate attributes and curriculum design; telephone interviews with renowned leaders in HSPR-related careers; online surveys of current HSPR students, recent alumni of HSPR training programs and employers of HSPR graduates; an invitational workshop; and an interactive panel at a national conference. Readers who wish to ‘skip to the chase’ can simply bypass the methods and analysis sections of this paper and review the final framework in the results section (page 75). We wish to emphasize from the outset that we did not set out to professionalize HSPR with narrowly defined, task-specific competencies. Instead, we aimed for a framework of desirable graduate attributes that was clear enough to serve as a touchstone for HSPR training programs across Canada yet flexible enough to permit diversity of specialization across and within those programs. The final framework lists attributes that would ideally be possessed by all graduates of master's programs in HSPR, regardless of their area of specialization. Similar frameworks for subspecialties of the HSPR field – including frameworks for doctoral-level trainees – should be developed through subsequent consultation processes.