Intro

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Conference Conversation's Focus 2022 Podcast Series. In this episode, Mark Round, Managing Director of Symmetry Physiotherapy, board member and National Vice President of the Australian Physiotherapy Association, Chair of the Physiotherapy Research Foundation and board member of the Australian Physiotherapy Council, Dr Paula Harding, Victorian practitioner member of the Physiotherapy Board of Australia and Barwon Health Director of Allied Health and Alfred Health as the Allied Health Workforce Unit Manager, Jackie Robertson, member of the Australian Physiotherapy Association and Current National Business Group Chair and Ellen McMaster, rural physiotherapist, Chair of the APA National Rural Advisory Committee, New South Wales Branch Council, Rural Representative, Physiotherapy Advisor for the Local Public Health District and a member of the District Clinical Council discuss the workforce challenges facing physiotherapy nationally.

Before we start this series of Conference Conversations podcasts has been brought to you by the Physiotherapy Research Foundation, supporting the promotion and translation of research and supported by Pain Away Platinum and Content sponsor of the PRF. Let's get started.

Mark

Hi everyone, my name's Mark Round. I'm the Vice President of our Australian Physiotherapy Association and also the Chair of the Physiotherapy Research Foundation, and welcome to this podcast on workforce. Before I introduce our speakers, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that we're meeting on today, the Wurundjeri People and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. We have three fantastic speakers today. Firstly, Paula Harding.

Paula

Hi Mark. Yeah, so my name's Dr Paula Harding. I'm the Victorian Practitioner Member for the Physiotherapy Board of Australia. Also the director of Allied Health at Barwon Health. And I also have a workforce role at Alfred Health. The workforce is pretty important in all those roles and it’s definitely very topical at the moment. Yeah, lots to talk about in regards to workforce, particularly in the public sector where I work because it's been pretty challenging couple of years for physios working in the public sector.

Mark

Thanks Paula and Jackie Robertson?

Jackie

Hi, I'm Jackie Robertson. I'm the APA National Business Chair and a private practitioner, very passionate about workforce because I think it has been a big issue in the last few years and to move into the future, we need a sustainable workforce for practises to remain sustainable and profitable.

Mark

Thanks Jackie. And last but not least, Ellen McMaster.

Ellen

Hi Mark. I'm Ellen McMaster. I'm a physiotherapist from Rural New South Wales. I'm the Chairperson of the Rural Advisory Committee for the Australian Physiotherapy Association. And I'm involved because there's 7 million people living in rural Australia and workforce is a really challenging area as Jackie mentioned and it's really important that everybody has access to the health services that they need.

Mark

Thank you. And before we dive into the detail of workforce, it's obviously a really important issue in our profession right now. Can I just get all three of you to give just a brief top line background and your perspective on the workforce currently? Paula?

Paula

I don't want to be dramatic, but I think workforce is in a bit of a crisis. You know, COVID’s really made an impact. We have a lot of burned-out staff, we have a lot of staff thinking about what else they could be doing with their lives. The great resignation is probably a real thing. I think we really need to focus on the next few years to make sure we do something really proactive rather than reactive to deal with the workforce shortage that we're facing.

Mark

And Jackie?

Jackie

In private practise I think it’s the biggest influence on how the profitability and sustainability of business, the burnout, the lack of remuneration, the lack of career pathway perceived, stress levels in private practise is influencing the workforce as well. So it's multifactorial as to what's happening to our workforce and I do agree that if we don't address it now, the future will not be good if we are looking into move into new areas such as primary care.

Mark

And Ellen?

Ellen

I would echo Jackie's thoughts with private practise and also factoring in the public health service. In rural areas the challenge also is the competition with the metropolitan workforce crisis. If there's a lot of jobs available in metropolitan Australia, there's no drive for people to look for work out in rural areas. There are vacancies out there just through normal workforce movement and it's very difficult to recruit and attract staff to those positions. And it's also difficult to support them with a very threadbare workforce out there with only 17% of the physiotherapy workforce working in rural Australia.

Mark

So clearly workforce is an issue. Paula, you're the Victorian representative on the physio board of Australia and recently you've been involved in a study on workforce. Can you just give us the current areas of concern that your study has highlighted?

Paula

Well, the study has really just gathered some of our data sources that we have on workforce. I suppose the first thing to mention is we don't have all the data we'd like to have and that's a challenge in regards to interpreting the data and fully understanding the challenges of the workforce. I've got a few stats I can fire off that might help paint a picture of the physiotherapy workforce and our demographics as it stands in 2022. Physiotherapy is the fourth largest regulated health profession. We do have over 39,000 registered physios in Australia, 93% of those hold general registration. So we have about 148 physios per a hundred thousand head or population on average. And the ACT have the highest number of physios with 175 physios per a hundred thousand people and Northern Territory has the lowest with 96 physios per hundred thousand people.

As we've heard, 81% of our physios work in the major cities. So the bulk of the workforce is in our metro regions. But there has been a slight shift. So compared to 2017/2018, the numbers of physios working in inner regional cities have actually proportionally increased compared to the metro regions. But not so much in the rural and remote areas. The average age of our physio workforce is 38.8 years old and 64% are female. Only 0.7% identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and 13.7% have obtained their qualification outside of Australia. We do know that 72% work in the private sector and the majority in a group private practise setting and they would just find that that the scope of practise is predominantly in the musculoskeletal area with 52% of our workforce working with that scope of practise followed by aged care be 15%. I suppose finally, our physio workforce is growing, so it's not all bad news in regards to our workforce since 2015 our physio workforce has increased by 23%, which is a growth rate of about 5.3%.

But there's still lots of challenges because the demand is obviously increasing at the same time and we don't necessarily have the data around where the shortages are, why we might have so many physios leaving our profession, which is also evident in the data. And what are the other challenges in regards to the data we don't know about? Such as where are the gaps and the vacancies, you know, what positions are they, what scope of practise are they? So there's a bit of data indicating where we’re sitting in regards to workforce, but there's also a lot we don't know about.

Mark

I'd like to touch on a couple of points you've just raised there. The first thing you mentioned was that you've got some data but you haven't got all the data or all the data we need. Have you got any thoughts on how we can get more data or into the future how we get the data we need to look at our workforce more in a whole sense?

Paula

Yeah look, I think 2014 Health Workforce Australia did quite a bit of workforce gap analysis, digging down and get deeper in regards to what the workforce needs are and what the current workforce issues are. I think in particular understanding the attrition rate and why people are leaving the profession because it's hard to fix a problem if you don't know the reasons contributing to why. We do know that a lot of physios leave within the first 10 years of being registered. That leaves a real gap in our senior experienced workforce. I mean it'll be really, I suppose important to know why is that the case, why are they leaving, what are the reasons and what sort of things could we do to change or turn that around.

Mark

Yeah, attrition is definitely an issue. I might even ask that of you, Jackie, just anecdotally because we don't have a heap of the data, but can you give us some insights on what you feel might be some of the reasons for our high attrition rate?

Jackie

Well, I think attrition is definitely something that needs good research and quality research. But generally, in talking around the grounds to practises, remuneration is a big factor in why people leave the profession. That lack of career progress, which is attached to remuneration. So the difficult part for a private practise to pay well is that they must earn income. The two often don't meet. So that can be a cause. I think burnout is another thing in private practise where people are trying to make money and being paid a commission and so they have to work very hard to actually earn a reasonable income. So burnout, lack of perceived career pathway and lack of mentoring within the business itself.

Often small businesses just don't have the capacity to mentor the new graduates and the physios through their career. So it's a double edged sword I think. We want to keep our physios, we want to pay them well but we're not being remunerated well for our services. What's the solution there?

Mark

And Ellen, I'll throw to you as well, in Paula's statistics there, she mentioned that in the early growth that was mainly in metropolitan areas, you've talked about the amount of people in rural remote areas. Do you see attrition being an issue in rural and remote physio practises and/or hospital settings?

Ellen

I think it's across the board, Mark. Something that we do need to say is that physio is a great profession and the skillset that we have is very transferable to a lot of leadership and organisational type roles. So that is part of it. I think also the study system, so physiotherapy, is now seen as perhaps a stepping stone to other careers intentionally or that might just be happening organically. When people are trained as physios though that skillset and that loyalty to the profession perhaps is not lost. So we need to also be thinking that these people that have trained as physios and gone to do something else are perhaps allies to the profession. So we maybe need to be thinking about that. But certainly, there is the leap out of the profession. The other large factor, of course, is parenthood with the majority of the occupation being female and the time of life that people are finishing their studies and working towards a family if that's their goal. So that's some observations from my point of view.

Mark

I'd like to touch also, Paula, you mentioned hope, I've got these numbers right, 23% growth since 2015.

Paula

Yes.

Mark

Anecdotally I would've thought that probably occurred probably between 2015 and 2020. Have you got data over the last couple of years? Because it seems on the ground that we probably have flatlined a little bit. Would you agree with that or is it we haven't got the data at this stage?

Paula

No, I wouldn't agree with it because we know that our student cohort coming through has increased quite a bit. So I think it's a 13% increase in student enrolments in the physiotherapy courses. We've had a number of education providers and physiotherapy programs increase significantly in the last 10 years and we do have a really good rate of students actually completing their studies. So our student numbers are increasing so we know that's increased by 13% since 2015/16. The completion rate of our physios completing their studies is better than other health education programs. Our physio students dropout rate is about 6.4% compared to 20% for all other health fields. So our students are graduating in increasing numbers. So it's not really the pipeline issue, it's probably the issue we spoke before, which is the attrition because we are actually replacing the physios who are leaving the register with our new graduates at increasing numbers. So it's definitely not at the early end. It's at the later end that we're losing our physios.

Mark

Something else which may have impacted on and we can talk a little bit about that is obviously COVID. What have we seen in terms of COVID and the workforce, especially also looking at overseas physios who may or may not have been able to get into the country, which might give that sense for less physios on the ground. Jackie, have you got a sense from private practise?

Jackie

I think they have relied a bit on the overseas trained physios coming in. So there's been a stop to those and not many have started to come in at this stage due to other barriers. I think also that with illness and family, less females are staying in the workforce through the COVID episode, they've had to care for their families at home. The COVID illness and the isolation rules, I think, has been a big effect on business as well. So staffing levels have consistently been affected. So not so many people leaving, it's just that they can't sustain the staffing levels.

Mark

What are you seeing, Ellen?

Ellen

We're seeing similar trends. I think there's been a strain on all Australians and in healthcare it has been brutal. We are also seeing the increased demand because of COVID illness. I think rural people are really good at isolating, so COVID has taken a little longer the impact of COVID to reach the general population. So we’re still seeing that now. Patient cancellations has impacted the workflow in workplaces as well. And besides the staff illness and covering sick leave, people are fatigued but are actively trying to recover and so needing holidays and leave and so there's still a strain on the workforce.

So we’re sort of really in survival mode still at work that's impacting the workforce and the strain that we are feeling at the moment. In rural areas, we've also had the impact of natural disasters like the floods and the fires, which has, you know, impacted some communities significantly through COVID as well. I think the other thing that we're seeing in rural areas, we rely a lot on volunteers for committees and when people are in survival mode, the first thing to go is they're volunteering and so that's put a little bit of a spin on the committees that we’re feeling. Yeah, I guess from here it's just one day at a time and we’ll recover slowly.

Mark

And Paula, from the Physio Board's perspective on COVID, you talked about student numbers increasing over that period of time. Have you seen delays in students being able to finish their course due to placements or has that been relatively well under control?

Paula

Yeah, look, I think all parties, the universities, the hospitals and the APC and the Board have really looked at this closely and there was real concerns in that first year of COVID with placements being cancelled that that was really going to impact on the pipeline and our graduates. And a lot of work was done by everyone involved, I think to make sure we got those students through and to prioritise and protect them and keep them safe as well because there was obviously a lot of concerns with the hospitals with ward movement and access and trying to restrict exposure during that time with COVID when it was particularly in the early days. But I think we've come through that really well. I don't have the figures but I definitely know that the majority of our fourth and third years have all graduated that were expected to graduate.

There was a lot of additional placements found, there was a lot of scrambling and I think the importance of making sure that pipeline was sustained was dealt with very early on in the pandemic. So I think that's resulted in no major impact in the total numbers of graduates. It’s not significantly less than what we'd expect. I'm sure there might be the, a few that didn't quite get through in the time that they would've liked to with their, you know, placements being cancelled and I'm speaking from Victoria but I think that's, you know, Victoria was probably the worst hit in regards to lockdowns that impacted placements. So yeah, look, I think we're okay in that regard but it took a lot of, lot of effort on the part of all involved really.

Mark

So I want to move a little bit to the supply and demand continuum. We've talked a fair bit about supply and we've sort of ascertained, we've got a bit in the pipelines going through. We would argue there's still a bit of a workforce challenge. What about the demand for our services? Jackie, what are you seeing in your world?

Jackie

Demand for physiotherapy is continuing because I think there's a better patient awareness of what physiotherapy can do. So our promotion of physiotherapy through the APA, Mark, has been increasing every year their exposure of physio to the community. So we’re still seeing that people need physiotherapy. If we think we want to move into bigger areas such as primary care, we need the workforce to support that. And if we don't have the workforce we can't move into these new areas. I think a lot of practises have been wanting to expand into new ventures, new areas, but they don't have the workforce to support that. So I agree with Ellen, a lot of private practises are in survival mode so they can't think about demand or trying to increase their services, they've just got to be into the thrive and survive through all of this.

Mark

And Ellen, in your experience, are you seeing the demand for our services as physiotherapists increasing?

Ellen

Yeah, for sure Mark, besides the demand for COVID and now we're starting to see people come out the other side of that long period of isolation, perhaps less activity, more stress, we're seeing a lot of falls, we're seeing deconditioning, impacts of deconditioning over that period of time as well as people's awareness. I think there's still a portion of our community that doesn't really understand physiotherapy or what physiotherapists do because they've never had access to physio still. But that is changing as well, particularly in pockets where there is you know, some good services. So with these new areas like pushing out to first contact practitioner status and getting a little bit more recognition so we can support the doctors, the GPs, the nurses out there that are doing a great job. Yeah, I feel like there is definitely increased demand or potentially much greater increased demand.

Mark

Paula, from your work both on the physio board of Australia and also in your workforce and workplace, what are you seeing for demand for our services?

Paula

Yeah, look, I think we're seeing healthcare is just increasing in acuity and complexity all around and that's partly due to COVID with a lot of the delayed care. So there's a lot of pressures in regards to things like elective surgery access that the patients who are presenting to ED tend to be sicker and that all flows through to impact particularly our hospital-based physios, but our physios in the community and no doubt that of private practise as well. We also have the other demands of the NDIS which has increased significantly in regards to the demands, not just on physio, but on allied health and is projected to continue to increase. We're seeing aged care, the needs of residents in aged care are more complex and more acute and yet our workforce in aged care is younger and less experienced and tend to be where a lot of our overseas practitioners start.

So there's a real mismatch there with the demand in aged care. And I think the push to have more therapy in the home is definitely creating a different demand on our workforce. It's a lot of physios working in more isolated environments, which is particularly challenging for our junior workforce who are used to being, you know, in a team environment or in an outpatient or private practise setting. If they're now going out to the home, they're often working alone. So I think that there's demands in every area that just seem to be increasing with a workforce that is increasingly getting tighter.

Mark

Paula, I wanted to touch back a little bit on your study just around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander physiotherapists and where our statistics sit in that space.

Paula

Well Mark, despite I suppose the awareness of increasing importance of having physios who identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background, we only have 0.7% of our physio registrants who identify. Also our percentage of enrolled students that identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander is only around 1.3% and that hasn't changed for the last five years. So we have, I suppose these compounding issues around not having a workforce representative and not having students coming through who identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Ironers.

We also don't have a physio presence in territories like the Northern Territory for our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers and patients to access physiotherapy because as you know, majority of our physios work in the metro city regions. So there's that real issue of access representation and not having that pipeline of students coming through that will also improve our representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. But on a positive note, we have made changes to the accreditation standards for our education providers to include cultural safety standards in all the physiotherapy programs. So all our students coming through would've had access to cultural safety training, which is a start, but there's lots more work to be done to improve access and representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in our physiotherapy workforce.

Mark

Thanks Paula. I want to shift a little bit just to be a little bit more future focused. I think we've got from our discussion that we accept that there's a challenge in our workforce. We're not immune to that, most professions have got that at the minute and our pipeline is either increasing slightly or plateauing a little bit if we haven't got many overseas physiotherapists coming through. But if we can look at what we can do to ease this or to look at potential solutions looking future focused, what can we do to try and improve our workforce? Jackie, I'll throw to you first.

Jackie

I think we should look on the word retain, to retain our current workforce. Some short term goals in achieving this to maybe try and optimise the current workforce we've already got. Maybe try and make it more efficient. In private practise I think practises need a bit of support with their HR and their financial systems to make sure that they are optimising the use of their physiotherapists. Another thing I think from a private practise point of view, which comes up a lot in the reason why physios leave the profession is remuneration. So support and advocacy from the APA into increasing remuneration from third party bodies and recognition for the value of what we do, I think will go a long way in the short term to try and help retain physios. The other part of course is mentoring, particularly the new graduates that come through to mentor them through those difficult first couple of years. So we retain them in the workforce. And the other thing we're doing is polls, trying to find out from private practitioners how they feel things are going with their businesses and where the problems might be occurring in workforce. So there are some really good short term things that we can start working on straightaway.

 

Ellen

Yes, retention but also succession. It's okay for people to be mobile in the workforce in rural areas that may impact a hundred percent of the workforce in a small department. So that feels like we need to retain them, but you know, it comes down to people's choices. And what we do need to do is we need to build succession planning into the workforce and make sure that we are building recruitment and support services into our processes and particularly in the public health system. That's definitely part of the retention. I guess also in rural areas the support network is sometimes a little bit sparse. It's okay, like people who do want to take on the rural challenge need to feel comfortable asking for help and there needs to be those support networks and the Australian Physio Association is a really great place to start as well as the local networks in those rural areas.

So yeah, again the training pipeline or the workforce pipeline. So starting right back at school, making sure we sort of have got that input at schools, perhaps starting the allied health assistant training options so that people who might think that tertiary education is not an option can sort of consider entering allied health professions through another pathway, as allied health assistants. And then right through early career like student learning and then early career and making sure that those people are surrounded by the support and opportunities for professional development. The uptake of virtual and telehealth has really opened things up in rural areas for access. So access for professional development, access for support and supervision and also access to physiotherapy services virtually that perhaps was not available before as well as the communication and network. So that's definitely part of an appealing change that will help with retention.

Mark

So Paula, Jackie and Ellen have both mentioned mentoring and support for physios, especially younger physios. Would you agree with that and also any other potential solutions you can look at from our workforce?

Paula

I wouldn't limit it to just our junior physios. I actually think we want the seniors to stay around. So we are also extending that to our more experienced physios to really build on their leadership capability. You know, it'd be great to sort of strategically position physios in decision making leadership positions with funding bodies. That would be wonderful. So I think it's also extending that to all areas in regards to trying to keep that workforce or keep those physiotherapists in the workforce. The other short term solutions that I think would be is getting better data. So we've really got a good handle on the reasons why. So both quantitative and qualitative data that help us understand where the workforce issues are so we can have a targeted approach and be solutions focused rather than sort of trying to put the band-aid on and fix things short term.

But I think definitely if we target that supervision, we know the areas like I mentioned before, aged care where we have that combination of complexity with junior inexperienced trained physios, you know, what is the supervision structure we need for that and the, and the PD that we need for those areas where we have really current and present issues that we have to address. And I do think there's, there's some really good opportunities for partnership with regional and rural partners with the Metropolitan City Hospital's services, even larger private practises to offer support and have those partnerships and that might extend beyond just our physio partners but to our other professions as well that build on the interdisciplinary practise and share some of the learnings that we're all working through in regards to the workforce issues at the moment. So look, I think there's a lot of short term things we can do.

Mark

And what about long term things?

Paula

Long term? Look, I think it's really about trying to drive that healthcare reform and position physio well in the decision making. We've seen what's happened with the aged care reform and the recommendations we really need to push for evidence-based practise in all areas of health. And I think physio are really well positioned in that, you know, our goal is to keep people out of hospital to avoid surgery that's not necessary to really promote those conservative management pathways that we know are really effective, non-pharmacological, you know, methods of treatment. So we don't have back pains getting opioid management, which we know has a huge cost to society.

So I think long term we just need to keep advocating for the strengths of what our profession can do, position ourselves well with the leadership and trying to get physios in all sorts of areas of leadership that inform those policies. Whether it be the NDIS, whether it be government positions that make these decisions and that long term might then start to turn around what's been a fairly traditional way of funding healthcare, which probably has limited the access for many people, particularly rural and remote, our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander folk, our people that are vulnerable and low socioeconomic that can't access physio who really need it.

Mark

It taps also into demand as well, doesn't it? You talk about keeping people out of hospital avoiding, opioid use. That's the increased demand for our services, which I think we've all agree is increasing. I think that the physio wide profession understands we've got a workforce issue. Definitely the APA is aware of that and I know the physio board and the Australian Physio Council and the university. So I think if we can work together to work on solutions for our workforce. I want to finish up now with a couple of take home messages from you all, around what we can be doing together to try and address our workforce challenges. Paula, I'll go with you first.

Paula

Okay, so quick summary, data, being proactive in solutions based, really focusing on our leadership structure, really good supervision and mentoring, which is targeted to need. So whether that be our junior workforce, our rural remote, I think they're all things that we can all work on together and create some really good partnerships both within and external to physio that can help hopefully address some of these workforce issues. The board's got a few areas around our overseas trained practitioners looking at making it as safe and accessible as possible for physios to stay in in the workforce, whether that be looking at their recency of practise, continuing education requirements. So I think there's lots of avenues that we can tackle this problem.

Mark

And Jackie?

Jackie

I think the important thing is everything that Paula has said definitely, but I think if we really want to nail it down to retaining our workforce that are currently working is to work on that satisfaction and that satisfaction and remuneration in their career pathway in their actual job. And I think we can do that many, many ways. But the one way I think is really good is to elevate physio up to that primary care level and that recognition for what we do and that movement into an advanced practise I think will really help to satisfy people's careers.

Mark

So really looking at strong advocacy for the profession. And Ellen?

Ellen

I agree with Paula and Jackie, on the whole rural has the same similar issues. Just the demography, the demographics of Australia's population and our workforce is different for rural. It will always be different for rural and therefore rural does need slightly different solutions that can't be the same for everybody. So for example, incentives for people to relocate to rural Australia, incentives to support those people, particularly those that look for early career opportunities. And there's a lot of opportunities out there for new graduates or people looking for a change from their way of life and there's really great opportunities to get ahead financially in rural areas, especially in these tough economic times.

So yeah, I think all of those solutions and supporting the change and making sure that there is the support for the workforce that is willing to go out there to work in rural areas, that's really important for the people that live out there. That cultural responsiveness of the services too, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people from non-English speaking background need to really make sure that we customise our services and our workforce.

Mark

You all talked about some great opportunities in the physio landscape. There is some really good upside for what we do. It's a really exciting time to be a physio and if we can try and get enough physios to look after our communities, that would be great. Any last comments to finish from any of you?

Jackie

Mark, I'd just say that workforce is a very big topic around all of Australia and it's wonderful that we can start really talking about it and I think everybody will support the APA, the APC, everybody in just trying to both train workforce and retain workforce.

Paula

I have a final thing to say. I know there was a National Skills report that looked at the resilience of different occupations. They used a framework to measure resilience against and physio was described as a resilient workforce and I think we are a really resilient workforce. Yes, we may have dropped off a little bit during COVID with our employment figures, but we certainly have bounced back and we are a bit tired and a bit burnt out, particularly in the hospital setting. But we are a resilient workforce and I think the future is really bright and it's just about leading the way in healthcare as physios usually and always do.

Ellen

If I could echo the words of a presenter recently from our focus conference, it's the best time to be a physio.

Mark

That's great. I agree with that. It's also good to look at that resilience that we have got through this and to be in a position where we have demand for our services is a good position to be. So thanks very much to Paula Harding, Jackie Robinson, and Ellen McMaster for your time today.

Ellen

Thanks Mark.

Paula

Thank you, Mark.

Jackie

Thank you, Mark.

Outro

That was Mark Round, Managing Director of Symmetry Physiotherapy, APA National Vice President, Chair of the Physiotherapy Research Foundation and board member of the Australian Physiotherapy Council. Dr Paula Harding, Victorian practitioner member of the Physiotherapy Board of Australia and Barwon Health Director of Allied Health and Alfred Health as the Allied Health Workforce Unit Manager. Jackie Robertson, member of the Australian Physiotherapy Association and current National Business Group Chair. And Ellen McMaster, rural physiotherapist, Chair of the APA National Rural Advisory Committee, New South Wales Branch Council Rural Representative, Physiotherapy Advisor for the Local Public Health District and a member of the District Clinical Council. You've been listening to another episode of Conference Conversations brought to you by the Physiotherapy Research Foundation and Pain Away Platinum and Content sponsor of the PRF. Thanks for listening and make sure you catch the next episode in the Conference Conversations podcast series.

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