Celebrating the work of our Allied Health Professionals
The role and contribution made to the health and wellbeing of people living across BSW by Allied Health Professionals was highlighted recently during a special Allied Health Professional Day.
AHPs are the third largest clinical workforce in England and play an invaluable role in supporting delivery of BSW Together’s aims and goals.
They provide system-wide care to assess, treat, diagnose and discharge patients across social care, housing, education, and independent and voluntary sectors. Through adopting a holistic approach to healthcare, AHPs are able to help manage patients’ care throughout the life course from birth to palliative care.
The BSW AHP Day offered an opportunity for AHPs to come together and celebrate as well as to showcase to others the impact they make to the delivery of high-quality care.
BSW Together ICS has an AHP Council and an AHP workforce Faculty, where staff from across providers come together to discuss workforce transformation, service redesign and population health and care.
The BSW AHP Faculty provides the infrastructure to facilitate system-wide working between health and care providers and Health Education England. There are many benefits of working in this way which include; ensuring AHP students have sufficient access to rich learning environments and creating sustainable and innovative recruitment and retention strategies to ensure our pipeline of AHP professionals continues to thrive and grow.
The BSW AHP Faculty is currently focusing on empowering the AHP support workforce and embedding the Support Worker Framework into business as usual across BSW.
The Support Worker Framework enables BSW ICS to effectively plan, develop, and deploy their AHP support workforce. It provides guidance on training, education and competencies for AHP support workers and demonstrates a clear pathway for recruitment and progression.
In addition, the BSW Faculty has been working on numerous workforce supply and transformation projects including apprenticeships, preceptorships, encouraging return to practice and international recruitment.
Box: who are Allied Health Professionals?
AHPs are a diverse group of clinicians who deliver high-quality care to patients and clients across a wide range of care pathways and in a variety of different settings. They play an important role in modern health and social care services.
They include occupational therapists, paramedics, physiotherapists, orthoptists, radiographers, speech and language therapists, dietitians, chiropodists/podiatrists, osteopaths and others.
You can find out more about working as an AHP in BSW Together and the BSW Academy here https://bswtogether.org.uk/academy/