AHPs Day - Blog by Shane Degaris
Today is the first ever National Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) Day.
It’s an opportunity for us all to celebrate the contribution and impact our AHP colleagues make to the health and wellbeing of our patients every day.
As the new deputy CEO here at Barts Health, I’m really proud of my own clinical background as an AHP. It provides me with a different outlook and perspective when trying to tackle issues at an executive level.
My background is in physiotherapy, which is one of the 14 professions that make up the AHP workforce.
I qualified and worked clinically as a physiotherapist for a number of years in Australia before moving over to the UK in 1996.
When I was growing up I knew I wanted to be a physiotherapist. I suffered many sports injuries as a teenager and I was fascinated by the rehabilitation work my physiotherapists did.
Although I initially specialised in musculoskeletal conditions, I soon realised there were a number of other specialisms available, such as neuro-rehabilition and orthopaedics. I found this really exciting.
I moved over to the UK in 1996 as a senior physiotherapist. I then became superintendent for physiotherapy and from there the Head of Outpatient Physiotherapy, then Head of Therapies. It was only at this stage in my career that I moved into general management.
AHPs Day therefore holds real significance for me and I'm pleased that we are embracing the day here at Barts Health.
AHPs’ holistic approach to healthcare enables them to manage patients’ care throughout the life course, from birth to palliative care. Their primary focus is on prevention and improvement of health and wellbeing to maximise the potential for people to live full and active lives. Without our AHPs, we would be lost.
What would we do if our physiotherapists or speech and language therapists weren’t here to help rehabilitate our patients and reduce their length of stay in hospital?
If we didn’t have dietitians or Occupational Therapists doing fantastic early prevention work, how would we deal with the vast number of additional patients being admitted to hospital on a daily basis?
I really hope in the years to come, we see more and more AHPs moving into senior roles and leadership positions within the NHS. They make up the third largest workforce in the NHS behind medics and nurses, and the more diversity of medical experience we have at the ‘top table’, the better the outcomes will be for patients.
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