The Allied Health Assistant (AHA) workforce is growing rapidly, and it’s playing an increasingly integral role in health care. Specifically, allied health assistants augment and assist with the services provided by allied health professionals. This work is proving vital, as not only does it ease the considerable demand on healthcare, it has a qualitative flow-on effect: the work carried out by AHAs contributes directly to patient care while allowing allied health professionals to devote more focused attention to more specialised tasks and assessments.
While not a new profession, the allied health workforce is still finding its feet. In April 2022, the Allied Health Assistants’ National Association Ltd A.H.A.N.A. was incorporated in Australia to provide a national membership and accreditation framework AHAs.
This week’s edition examines this exciting career pathway in detail from several points of view: prospective students, AHA employers, and AHAs themselves.
We discuss the formation of A.H.A.N.A. and what this means for the future of the AHA workforce, and we invite your feedback around the proposed AHA membership structure. We take a look at the issue of delegation in allied health and recommend some strategies to ensure that allied health teams work most effectively with AHAs. We offer some advice for onboarding newly employed AHAs. And, fittingly, our A to Z of Allied Health feature this week highlights the allied health assistant profession.
