Senior Research Fellow

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA)

Senior Research Fellow - National Office
Position Number: EAO01369
Work Type: Permanent full-time
Location: Preferred locations include AHPRA Hobart (National Office) - Level 3, 86 Collins Street, Hobart or AHPRA National Office - Level 7, 111 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Closing Date: 30 July 2014 at 4:00pm AEST

Classification: AHPRA Level 7 Senior Technical Specialist
Reports To: National Director, Strategy and Research

Contact (for enquiries and/or submission)
Enquiries: Lisa Wardlaw-Kelly, National Director, Strategy and Research, lisa.wardlaw-kelly@ahpra.gov.au, 03 6281 7921 or 0422 007 066
Submissions: Human Resources, recruitment@ahpra.gov.au, +61 (03) 8708 9277

Organisational Context

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) is the national organisation established to implement a modern national regulatory system for health professionals. AHPRA and 14 National Boards work in partnership to deliver the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme, which started in Australia on 1 July 2010 (18 October 2010 for Western Australia). The purpose of health practitioner regulation is to protect the public, by facilitating access to services provided by health practitioners who have the skills, qualifications and knowledge to provide safe and quality care.
AHPRA has an office in each State and Territory responsible for the majority of operational matters and a national office in Melbourne. AHPRA reports to a Ministerial Council and is governed by an Agency Management Committee appointed by the Ministerial Council. AHPRA supports the operations of the National Boards for each profession covered by the scheme, and the State and Territory boards and committees established by the National Boards.
AHPRA and the National Boards each have a set of responsibilities and functions that are set out in the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act, as in force in each state and territory. AHPRA and the National Boards work in partnership to regulate the professions and implement the National Scheme. This includes maintaining a national public register of health practitioners, managing concerns about the health, performance or conduct of registered practitioners, and registering practitioners who meet the standards set by the Boards.

The Job

AHPRA requires the services of a Senior Research Fellow with high level statistical skills to work within AHPRA's newly established Strategy and Research team. The Senior Research Fellow will help lay the foundations for an enduring program of research and analysis that will ensure a sound empirical basis for regulation of health professionals. The successful applicant must demonstrate broad research and analysis skills at a senior level. In addition to their general expertise in research methods, they will provide statistical leadership across the all 14 regulated health professions, working with the National Boards to identify high priority areas for analysis and leading the delivery of analytical projects and outputs to support regulatory decision-making. They will also provide expert methodological advice on the design of analytical projects and provide statistical services relating to sampling, survey design, and quality assurance of outputs. Initially a hands-on role, with responsibility for the delivery of analysis to support regulatory decision-making, the position has the potential to evolve into a managerial role, leading an expert team to meet demand for analysis from National Boards.

Key Result Areas
The occupant will be required to deliver against the following role specific areas:

Work with the National Boards to identify high priority areas for analysis.
Facilitate, supervise and undertake analysis of regulatory data to enable risk-based regulation of health practitioners.
Interrogate administrative databases to identify and explore factors associated with risk to the public.
Manage and/or undertake the design, implementation and reporting of specific analytical studies as agreed with National Boards under the Health Profession Agreements.
Provide advice on survey design, set-up and implementation, including sampling, questionnaire development, quality assurance, and the production of analytical outputs.
Provide methodological advice in respect of the practitioner audit process and analytical and research projects undertaken on behalf of National Boards.
Explore opportunities to integrate data from other sources including coronial information, insurance data, health service utilization, professional associations and safety and quality bodies.

Communication
Communicate relevant information to AHPRA, National Boards and external stakeholders through the presentation of analysis and summary statistics using graphical, tabular, geospatial, narrative and other representations of the data as appropriate to the topic and audience.
Develop case studies and reports to communicate areas of regulatory risk, provide analytical content for board papers, presentations, reports and communiques.

Capacity building
Work with internal stakeholders to continuously improve AHPRA's capacity to utilise routinely collected registration and notifications data to support risk-assessment and workforce analysis.
Provide advice to operational and business service areas as required on systems, processes, databases, metadata, forms design, information management and other areas as requested.
Coach and develop AHPRA staff to increase skills in statistical analysis and critical appraisal of research evidence.

Partnerships and engagement
Liaise with statistical partners on the delivery of the Health Workforce Survey.
Promote external collaboration on research and analysis relevant to the scheme, and coordinate AHPRA's involvement in relevant research partnerships.
Supervise the extraction, quality assurance and confidential release of data for external researchers.
Engage with statistical stakeholders to develop long term relationships with a view to collaboration on data integration.

All AHPRA staff are expected to comply with the following:
Our Way of Working
Incorporate the AHPRA Way of Working into daily work practices.
Comply with the AHPRA Code of Conduct and all other AHPRA policies and procedures.
Understand and apply the information contained in any AHPRA mandatory or job related training.
Customer Service
Provide a professional, proactive, accurate, efficient, and confidential customer focused service to a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.
Workplace Health and Safety Management
Identify and report any health and safety problem, hazard/risk or defect which may give rise to danger.
Report any health and safety incident immediately.
Implement measures to rectify cause of any incidents.

Key Selection Criteria

Achieve results: set high standards of performance for self and others, displays drive and commitment to objectives and an ability to plan and organise self and others to achieve results.
Critical thinking: is a strategic thinker, demonstrating an understanding of how governments regulate in the public interest, has sound research, analytical, conceptual and problem solving skills and capacity to provide robust analysis to support decision-making.
Communication skills: is a fluent and influential communicator, with high level interpersonal and written communication skills. A persuasive public speaker with the ability to synthesise and communicate complex quantitative information to a variety of audiences.
Collaboration: is organisationally and culturally aware, with a strong track record of building constructive and respectful relationships with stakeholders and within their organisation, including the ability to work collaboratively within a team, to drive collaborative efforts across professions and to coach and develop team members.
Flexibility: is adaptable and receptive to new ideas and ways of working; cooperates well with others in the pursuit of team goals, responds and adjusts easily to changing work demands and circumstances including the occasional need to work outside of business hours or travel to attend meetings interstate.
Integrity: shows high levels of professionalism and probity, preparedness to engage responsibly with risk, sound judgment, courage, resilience and a high level of self-awareness. Understanding of, and commitment to the principles of privacy, confidentiality and management of protected information. Demonstrated commitment to the importance of public information in society, and to logic and statistical method as a means of ensuring the quality and objectivity of this information.
Applies professional expertise in research and statistics:
- Demonstrated expertise in research methods, including research questions, search strategies, critical appraisal, assessing bias and measurement error, and report writing.
- Experience in qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis
- Experience in the application of appropriate analytic techniques and tools to real-world problems.
- Experience cleansing and analysing large data sets using a range of statistical techniques.
- Experience in the application of data analysis to public health risk management or health care quality improvement.
- Proficiency in statistical software packages for example, SAS, STATA, SPSS.
- SQL technical skills, expertise in database query development and knowledge of clinical/medical coding systems would be an advantage.
- Exposure to Adobe LiveCycle or similar electronic forms package desirable.
Qualifications

1. Relevant graduate and/or post graduate qualification in statistics, epidemiology, public health or related analytic discipline.
2. Desirable: a PhD in a discipline relevant to the subject matter, demonstrated experience at a managerial level and evidence of professional credibility.