Led by moderator Nils Vesk, a business innovation expert, the panel discussion revolved around the evolution of Australia’s allied health landscape and where physiotherapy sits within it. 

Bronwyn Morris-Donovan, the CEO of Allied Health Professions Australia, kicked off the discussion with an examination of the allied health landscape. 

Bronwyn said that allied health as a group of professions—30, including physiotherapy—has become increasingly significant at the healthcare reform table given the move towards multidisciplinary team care, the unsustainable rise in costs and a shortage of general practices and GPs. 

‘The Commonwealth has no choice but to look for the role that allied health professionals can play to fill some of those gaps,’ she said. 

Bronwyn noted that allied health is no longer fighting for a seat at the table and that a draft national allied health workforce strategy is likely to be signed off soon, which will be leveraged in developing policy. 

‘Allied health professionals can be cost saving when working at top of scope and can improve access for the consumer,’ she said. 

Professor Susan Hillier, a physiotherapist, clinical researcher and academic at the University of South Australia, then talked about how allied health teams are integral to patient care, particularly in her area of specialty in stroke care. 

Susan said that effective teamwork needs excellent communication, relevant disciplines as part of the team and role clarity for each discipline. 

‘We don’t want to go into a team thinking we have some kind of advantage. 

We want to go in feeling like equals. 

‘Our strengths as physios are that we have a long history, we are better known than some of the newer allied health, we are incredibly well educated and we are confident. 

‘Those are the advantages that we bring and our roles are understood.’ 

Susan wrapped up her comments by noting that allied health needs funding models to support teamwork and digital and other solutions to foster communication when we can’t actually be in the room with the client. 

Team-based care is especially important in rural communities, said Nick Jones, a Darwin-based physiotherapist and the chair of the APA’s Rural and Remote Health Advisory Committee. 

He said it could improve access to healthcare and enhance service sustainability; enable tailored, person-centred approaches; and address local needs and workforce shortages. 

‘A rural or remote health team will bring in external and intermittent health professionals to make it complete. 

‘The teams we end up with in rural and remote spaces tend to be smaller and more flexible; they’ve got broader scopes of practice and they often engage more deeply with the local community, tailoring services to individual needs. 

‘This enhances person-centred care and community engagement,’ Nick said, emphasising that physiotherapists need to be really flexible in the rural and remote environment and be well integrated into the wider healthcare team. 

Dr Paula Harding, chair of the Physiotherapy Board of Australia, then talked about scope of practice. 

Paula noted that working to the top of scope of practice was a physiotherapist’s own responsibility and was not regulated by the Board. 

She talked about the factors involved in scope of practice, including education, skills, experience, recency of practice and workplace context. 

‘It is fluid, it changes and it can vary from one physio to the next. 

‘Ultimately, it is your responsibility to understand and work within your own scope of practice,’ she said. 

Paula also discussed the role of advanced practice in physiotherapy and some of the enablers that have allowed advanced practice to evolve in public health, such as approved courses of study and endorsements linked to practitioner registration, as well as how this might play out in private practice. 

‘Could an endorsement on registration support expansion of advanced practice beyond hospital walls?’ she asked, noting that the Board was interested in working with the profession and stakeholders to explore this further. 

Professor Saravana Kumar, also from the University of South Australia, then discussed instilling a strong professional identity through physiotherapy training. 

Saravana talked about the need to include authentic learning experiences and work-integrated learning in physiotherapy training as well as the importance of minimising workforce attrition by teaching resilience, providing support and mentoring. 

‘When they go into the workforce, they’ll know how to support themselves and their peers as well,’ he said. 

Finally, APA National President Rik Dawson spoke on maintaining physiotherapy’s professional identity while supporting allied health as a whole. 

‘When we’re talking about healthcare reform, we need to look at what the system needs and what each discipline can contribute to system reform,’ Rik said. 

‘We should be considering what physio can do to support system reform, creating models of care outside of the hospital that are effective and accessible in metro and regional areas.’ 

He said it was important to remind people of the value of physiotherapy across the entire scope of the profession, from paediatrics to gerontology and from the public hospitals to private clinics and community care. 

‘If we can understand our value within the system, we can promote it,’ he said. 

The session wrapped up with a discussion between the panellists on moving away from surgical and drug-focused models of care towards parallel and allied pathways of care and how allied health, and physiotherapists in particular, can start to drive that process. 

‘We need to do a lot of education on this because our stakeholders understand surgery and they understand medications but they don’t understand the “soft” stuff that we do. 

‘It’s predominantly a matter of behaviour change and empowering our clients to make the changes,’ Susan said. 

Bronwyn noted that there is a golden opportunity emerging for allied health due to unsustainable health costs and the rising prevalence of chronic and complex conditions. 

‘Those two things together are forcing the federal government to rethink the way we deliver primary healthcare services and hospital services. 

‘We have no choice but to think about better integration of allied health services in the primary healthcare setting,’ she said. 

Bronwyn said that while there is a long way to go before there is funding for multidisciplinary care in general practice, the seeds are there and Rik noted that the APA is already presenting potential models of care to the government. 

Barriers and enablers were identified, including the issues disadvantaging rural and remote health and the heavy bias towards the medical system over sharing the responsibility for health.