Accreditation

Accreditation refers to the certification (recogition), by some form of authoritory, of compliance with specified standards. Accreditation can be a useful workforce development strategy as it has the potential to ensure the quality of services and service delivery and ensure levels of competency and professionalism.

There are two main forms of accreditation:

Organisational accreditation which refers to the accreditation of treatment agencies.
Worker accreditation which refers to the accreditation of individual AOD specialist workers.

The Quality Improvement Council 1. Organisational accreditation

Organisational accreditation involves certification that an agency meets acceptable standards of service delivery, management, staffing, and organisational development. Such accreditation standards recognise the importance of workforce development initiatives at the organisational level and focus on assuring high quality service delivery.

Unlike the Aged Care and Child Care sectors, the AOD sector does not have a formal, national agency accreditation process. However, some jurisdictions have introduced quality assurance frameworks for AOD service providers. For example, the Victorian Department of Human Services has introduced a quality framework for Victorian AOD services, while other jurisdictions have introduced quality frameworks for NGOs receiving government funding. Compliance with service quality frameworks can be a management tool for not only improving the quality of service delivery, but also meeting workforce development and governance requirements.

For more information relevant to organisation accreditation see the Governance page on this website.

For more information relevant to quality assurance see the following web links:

Worker accreditation

Worker accreditation involves the formal recognition that a person is competent to carry out specific tasks. This can involve the requirement of workers to hold a minimum qualification level to be employed in a particular job role, or the registration of a qualified worker with a professional body.

Professional accreditation based on a qualification standard can be a useful workforce development strategy as it:

provides workers with relevant base level knowledge and skills
raises the professional profile of the workforce
provides consistency in the assessment of standards of practice
can be used as practice benchmarks in quality improvement processes
contributes to the development of formal career paths
allows for transportability of skills between jurisdictions and organisations.

Some occupations in the AOD sector such as psychologists and social workers require registration with a relevant professional body. However, only one occupation involves accreditation as an AOD specialist.

An essential part of any worker accreditation processes involves the establishment of a minimum qualification level. To-date there is no national minimum qualification strategy for AOD specialist workers. Only two jurisdictions (Victoria and the ACT) currently have a minimum qualification strategy for AOD specialist workers.

For more information see the Minimum Qualifications page on this website.