Regulating health professional scopes of practice: comparing institutional arrangements and approaches in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK

BackgroundFundamentally, the goal of health professional regulatory regimes is to ensure the highest quality of care to the public. Part of that task is to control what health professionals do, or their scope of practice. Ideally, this involves the application of evidence-based professional standards of practice to the tasks for which health professional have received training. There are different jurisdictional approaches to achieving these …