Allied Health Insights Vol.2, No.11: Benchmarking Allied Health Workforce Ratios Across Australia’s Primary Health Networks

Allied health workforce planning in Australia is notoriously difficult—there’s no clear understanding of what constitutes allied health nationally, no single regulatory model for allied health professions and the variety of different employment settings further complicate any attempts at standardising workforce approaches.

Unlike the medical and nursing professions, there are no established workforce ratios for allied health professionals. This is compounded by the large overlap of many allied health professional roles and the opportunities for interprofessional substitution.

Despite the challenges of allied health workforce planning, it is widely accepted that there are national shortages of most allied health professionals. How is it possible to establish allied health workforce needs without accurate data?

We have been working on a range of tools to guide allied health workforce planning.

An example is the workforce supply and needs modelling we completed for Speech Pathology Australia, and we have completed similar modelling for a number of other allied health professions.

Given the importance of ensuring that allied health play a key role in optimising primary health care, we have developed a suite of tools to provide comparative benchmarks of the number of allied health professionals per 100,000 population, mapped to PHNs.

In this week’s edition of Allied Health Insights, we’ve provided an example of that comparative data, using the podiatry profession as an illustration.