Allied Health Insights Vol.2, No.15: Building Communities of Practice in Allied Health

If you’re an allied health professional (AHPs), Communities of Practice (CoP) are essential to your career development.

These communities are spaces for AHPs to discuss and solve specific clinical problems, share insights into patient care, and collaborate on evidence-based practice. CoPs have the potential to facilitate the sharing of new research findings, allowing for quicker adoption of innovative treatments and interventions.

By fostering collaboration across disciplines, CoPs help break down silos, leading to more integrated care—multidisciplinary primary care being one pertinent example. Such targeted collaboration and knowledge sharing can ensure that as an AHP, you are consistently advancing in your field and adapting to evolutionary changes in your sector.

This is the thinking behind our Allied Health Collectives, CoPs which we’ve created in partnership with our sister company The Allied Health Academy.

Building our Communities of Practice: AHP Global Collectives

These Communities of Practice provide access to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) resources, live webinars, and realtime discussion.

• The Advanced Practice Collective is a CoP for advanced allied health practitioners, as well as AHPs with an interest in evolving their skillset. This is free to join, and features our most recent webinar led by Dr Jo Morris and Felicity Martin from ACT Health.
• The Allied Health Assistant CPD Collective is a CoP with a specific focus on Continuing Professional Development for the fast-growing allied health assistant profession.

July also featured the first webinar for the Association of Regional Allied Health Networks, or ARAHN—a federation of allied health networks aligned to Primary Health Network footprints. Participants in the How to better engage allied health professionals with Primary Health Networks webinar discussed the opportunities for more effective integration of allied health in primary care decision-making and delivery. A Collective space is currently being prepared for members of the participating allied health networks, which will host the webinar recording, as well as future events and discussion forums.