ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the health professionals as practitioners to mirror the language of the legislation and national body. The introduction of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme in Australia in 2010 was designed to deliver a best practice structure for health practitioner regulation in order to support the provision of safe health care to the community. Health policy, including that concerning the health workforce, is a central and omnipresent concern to Australian governments. Australia's political structure then gave the Commonwealth, state and territory governments some incentive to work together to address health workforce regulation. In 1992, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reported that mutual recognition of professional qualifications was on the intergovernmental agenda, after being initiated as a form of micro-economic reform through Special Premier's Conferences in 1991 and 1992. There were both enduring policy problems and focusing events associated with this structural change to the governance of Australia's health workforce.
