Aboriginal Health Workers: professional qualifications to match their health promotion roles

Abstract

Aboriginal Health Workers are recognised as critical to meeting the health promotion needs of Indigenous communities, but addressing the complexity of these needs requires Aboriginal Health Workers to have a high level of professional skills and knowledge. Considerable progress has been made in developing health worker training programs, particularly in the vocational sector. However, a national review finds that training is still inadequate for enabling health workers to meet the level of communities' health needs and asks why this is so.