Friday, 23 May 2025
Working with Allied Health Professionals (AHPs)
Dr Colin Barnes
The collaboration of various healthcare professionals is key to Trusts being able to provide comprehensive care to patients. Allied Health Professionals (AHPs), a diverse group that includes physical therapists, Occupational Therapists (OTs), speech therapists and many others, play a crucial role in this interdisciplinary teamwork.
We enjoy supporting AHPs from the start of their employment in the preceptorship programme through to bespoke work for our Advanced and Consultant Clinical Practitioners. We have recently enjoyed having 12 AHPs on our Researcher Development Programme and are looking forward to having many more in our next cohort starting in January.
AHPs are frequent contributors to our Clinical Audit and evaluation work with recent topics including:
Accessibility to interpreters Speech and Language Therapy
The provision of fit notes by first contact Physiotherapists
Clinical outcomes of Psychology treatment in the pain service
Managing demand for domiciliary care for Podiatry
CAMHS Occupational Therapists audit of practice for learning disabilities
Those involved in our QI Programme have also addressed topics including:
Sensory stimulation in dementia care
Building skills for work in vocational rehabilitation
Reducing waiting lists in occupational therapy
Developing a specialist clinic for complex spasticity
Co-designing a postnatal education video
What else our AHPs and OTs have been involved in:
Our paediatric OTs have been heavily involved in our QI teams programme and also received funding from Dragons Den to produce a series of informative videos for parents. | 10 of our QI Leaders are AHPs and very involved supporting and developing improvement work in their services. | Our Physiotherapists and Podiatrists have gained significant insight from participating in our demand and capacity programme. |
More recently we have started working with the Integrated Care Board (ICB) AHPs faculty to support five fellows looking to improve international and equitable recruitment for AHPs across Hampshire.