With a postgraduate qualification behind you, your career will never skip a beat.

The Graduate Certificate in Health Professional Education is a professional development program for clinical, work-based or professional practice educators from all health professions.

The program provides educators with the essential skills required to facilitate effective learning in clinical, field and professional practice settings in the health disciplines, including dentistry, medicine, nursing, nutrition and dietetics, oral health therapy, pharmacy, physiotherapy, psychology, human services and social work.

Program features

• Offered part-time
• Flexible; complete over one or two years via a mix of on campus intensive face-to-face workshops, online and paper-based resources and workplace-based learning
• Strong multidisciplinary basis integrating knowledge and best practice from a range of health professions
• Use of real-life examples
• Assessment items tailored to individual professional needs and interests
• Pathways to postgraduate (Masters degrees) and higher degree study available

As the only health educator program of its kind in Queensland, it's sure to help improve the health of your career, while also improving the skills of the students you teach.

Enhancing the quality of clinical teaching

Participants in the first cohort of Griffith's Graduate Certificate in Health Professional Education are finding the program builds confidence and practical skills.

Physiotherapist Bridget Weeks, a Griffith graduate who has been working at the Gold Coast Hospital for over four years, said she was enjoying learning new teaching strategies.

"I take physiotherapy students on clinical placement and also supervise new graduates. While I have done some workshops in the past to build my confidence in clinical teaching, I also wanted a recognised qualification."

Ms Weeks said the first half of the program had already helped highlight some of the components that needed to be built into the clinical supervision program at the hospital. They included setting learning objectives, relevant learning activities and appropriate assessment strategies.

"It has certainly helped me evaluate the way we do things. For example, clinical teaching is not just about clinical techniques but also about supporting junior staff to manage a clinical load and work as part of a team."

While the program is mostly delivered online, Ms Weeks said the group workshops during the semester were very helpful in consolidating their individual learning.