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Education programs should be based on research about the knowledge and skills required for practice, rather than on intuition or tradition, but there is limited published curriculum research on health promotion education. This paper describes a case study of how workforce competencies have been used to assist evidence-based health promotion education in the areas of curriculum design, selection of assessment tasks and continuous quality assurance processes in an undergraduate program at an Australian university. A curriculum-competency mapping process successfully identified gaps and areas of overlap in an existing program. Previously published health promotion workforce competencies were effectively used in the process of selecting assessment items, providing clear guidelines for curriculum revision and a useful method to objectively assess competency content in an evidence informed framework. These health promotion workforce competencies constituted an additional tool to assess course quality. We recommend other tertiary institutions consider curriculum-competency mapping and curriculum based assessment selection as quality and evidence based curriculum review strategies.

This paper presents an overview of the important logistical and methodological considerations when conducting research in this setting. This paper is written for researchers new to the general practice setting. We discuss logistical challenges such as literature searching, ethical considerations, recruitment and retention of GPs, practices and patients, working with practices, and financial considerations. Methodological considerations including issues relating to patient recruitment, clustering, Hawthorne effect, ensuring conformity of intervention, avoiding contamination, and confounders are also discussed. A checklist for researchers contemplating research in this setting is supplied.

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