Developing a postgraduate work-based curriculum using an Intervention Mapping Approach

Advanced practitioner skill development has become an important focus in health service delivery as increasingly complex consumer needs, practice environments and national professional registration requirements impact on professional work practices. Increasingly, work-based or workplace learning experiences are being seen as an effective means for maintaining skill currency across working lives. Currently there is limited literature on pedagogical practices to support the educational and training requirements associated with development across a person's working life. This paper reports on an example of how an intervention mapping framework was used to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of a work-based praxis course for students in an interprofessional, online postgraduate mental health programme. The intervention mapping framework provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. This approach provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. While the use of the intervention mapping framework is often used within health promotion arenas, particularly for the effective design of health promotion educational programmes, it is argued that this framework can be utilised effectively when developing curriculum for use within higher education programmes.