Dietetic Workforce Development in Canada and Australia: Towards a Critical Policy Approach

The profession of dietetics must continually adjust practice to address emerging issues such as creating sustainable food systems, decolonizing professional structures, and creating a workforce that represents the diverse communities served. While the dietetics professions in Australia and Canada share these priorities, regulatory approaches to addressing them have yet to be examined using a critical policy analysis approach. This approach scrutinizes the systems in which policy is developed and enacted, examines the ways policy reinforces or challenges the status quo, and identifies who benefits and who does not from policy measures. Canada and Australia share some historical, social, and health challenges and often look to each other for lessons learned. By comparing education and workforce readiness policies in the two countries, we suggest that both would benefit from a more critical review of policy approaches. We note that while both countries define similar scopes of practice for dietitians, ensuring competence to practice approaches vary. These variations create fertile ground to apply a critical policy approach that identifies historical contexts, evidence that informs current practice, and the potential for inequitable impact on different groups. We invite our dietetics colleagues to join us in using this approach to bring about profession-wide transformation.