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• Anthony on more efficient use of allied health skills

03 Feb 2010

I am an allied health professional with over 15 years of clinical experience and postgraduate training.

I am continually frustrated by attempts to block the expanded scope of practice by different professional groups engaged in a 'turf war' over funding and maintaining the status quo of limited competition in health.

It is effectively like working with one arm tied behind your back, when you know you could be easily a staggeringly more productive member of the health care team.

Many decades of overseas experience has shown that health professions, other than the medical profession, can provide high level care in areas from primary care through to drug prescribing, and surgery.

These are simply not the exclusive domains of someone who has completed a medical degree.

What annoys me most is that if reforms were brought in to allow the non-medical workforce to practice to its full potential, then a whole range of 'access' issues could be solved overnight.

This needs to be wide ranging - free up Medicare to allow physio's to treat people without referral, allow patients to have foot surgery by podiatrists in public hospitals, let clinical psychologists prescribe appropriate mental health drugs, train optometrists to do cataract surgery.

This is common sense and occurs in many other western countries. I'm sure all of these things could be brought about here virtually overnight with the stroke of a pen and access to the suite of training and postgraduate support that is the privilege of the medical profession.

The community would then have more choice for providers, less waiting times for treatment, and ultimately comparable (or better!) outcomes.

The only people who won't be happy will be certain professional groups who are opposed to competition in health service provision, under the quasi-altruistic guise of deep concern for public health and safety.

If only the political will was there to deal with the bear in the room.