The role of quality assurance in osteopathic education
16 January 2025
Steven Bettles talks about the importance of quality assuring osteopathic education and the role this plays in ensuring patient safety is at the heart of everything we do at the GOsC.
It is our role to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of the public and to protect the reputation of the profession as well as the integrity of the register. We are responsible for the professional standards that osteopaths and students must follow in order to practise safely.
In order to ensure that only those able to meet the Osteopathic Practice Standards are admitted to the register, it’s important that we are satisfied that graduates of UK osteopathic education programmes have the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviours. We publish Graduate Outcomes which set out the outcomes graduates need to demonstrate in order to meet the OPS, and Standards for Education and Training (SET), which set out requirements on education providers in terms of education delivery, covering a range of themes.
Quality Assurance of osteopathic education and training provides assurance that standards are met and will continue to be met. Quality Assurance includes periodic visits to education providers to thoroughly review each aspect of the programme and how the SET and graduate outcomes are met and an annual reporting process in which the providers indicate how standards continue to be delivered. Providers must also update us on any key changes.
Bringing Quality Assurances services in house
We have, for many years outsourced our quality assurance provision. For the last five years (nearly) it has been delivered by Mott MacDonald, and we worked closely with them on the implementation of review visits and annual report analysis. As our contract with Mott MacDonald comes to an end in June 2025, our Council has taken the decision to bring our QA function in house. This means that we will oversee the process of visits and reporting ourselves, taking on the direct management of a pool of independent visitors to continue to provide independent and objective review and analysis of osteopathic education.
The benefits of bringing QA in-house include:
- A significant cost saving over a five-year period
- An ability to manage the process with consistency and flexibility, without the need to renew a contract each three to five years
- The opportunity to work more closely with the education providers, developing an enhanced relational approach to QA.
Working collaboratively
Our organisational values include being collaborative, influential and evidence-informed, and these are reflected in how we are managing the transition. We are working with the education sector on the move to in-house QA taking into account their views in developing a job description for a QA Visit Manager, for example, and how we develop the QA Visitor role whilst also retaining the expertise and insight of our independent Education Visitors to ensure a robust process and approach.
Looking forward
We want to continue to build on the open and trusting environment we hope we are already starting to create, understanding that this is key to high quality reflection and learning and making sure standards are met. We also want to continue to share good practice in education, working together with osteopathic educational providers to continue to deliver high quality education and training and safe, good quality osteopathic care for patients.
