With over 2000 Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) working across services in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw, the AHP workforce is the third largest staff group across the Shadow Integrated Health and Care System (SYB ICS).
Developed through work with all partners and a broad cross-section of AHPs, an AHP strategy consultation document was published for comment at a successful AHP event on 26 April 2018 – and there’s still time to share your views!
At the event, over 150 AHPs representing a broad range of professions, services and backgrounds heard from local, regional and national leaders about how as a collective workforce, AHPs are vital to developing and innovating services to meet the health and care needs of people across the region.
Sir Andrew Cash, chief executive of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and lead for the SYB ICS, launched the strategy consultation and outlined the important role AHPs have to play in the developing work of the Shadow Integrated Care System and the commitment to develop an AHP Council to take this work forward.
Chief Allied Health Professions Officer for NHS England, Suzanne Rastrick, gave an update on the national work she is leading, commenting that, “It is great that we as AHPs now have much more of a presence” and discussed the developing leadership roles for AHPs across the country.
Attendees on the day also heard from David Purdue, chief operating officer, and Laura Di Ciacca, head of acute therapies, at Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on the importance of integrating services; Dr Ben Jackson, GP and head of teaching in the Academic Unit of Primary Medical Care at the University of Sheffield, on the challenges faced in primary care and the role AHPs can play to address these; Mike Curtis, local director for Yorkshire and the Humber, Health Education England who explained the National Workforce Strategy for health and care services and Beverly Harden, AHP lead for Health Education England and the National Advisor for New Care Models at NHS England, inspired and challenged the audience on the future AHP workforce.
Sarah Cooper, clinical strategy and transformation lead for The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, explained the journey taken to develop the strategy so far and a number of AHP leaders from South Yorkshire, Bassetlaw and North Derbyshire led workshops to enable all delegates to have the opportunities to give their feedback and explore how they could get involved further, enabling every AHP across all partners to be engaged.
It is essential that the strategy reflects the needs of health and care in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw and so feedback is being requested. For more information, to download the strategy consultation documents and to share your views (by Friday 8 June), please visit: http://bit.ly/ICS_AHP
To view Twitter coverage from the event, you can do so by searching the hashtag: #AHP_ACS