AHPA contributed to the Australian Treasury’s call for pre-budget submissions. The 5 health priorities in our submission are:
- Build a Sustainable Allied Health Workforce – we argued that nationally consistent allied health workforce data is needed to support quality workforce planning, sustainability and service modelling.
- Improve access to multidisciplinary Allied Health care for people with Long COVID-19 – we warned that poor management of long COVID symptoms is estimated to generate up to $47billion in economic and social costs for the country and argued that public funding that reflects that multidisciplinary care is recognised as best practice care for people with symptoms of long COVID is needed.
- Integrate Allied Health into Existing Digital Infrastructure- Interoperable, accessible digital systems are required to enable the efficient and timely sharing of allied health information and the integration of allied health information to My Health Record (MHR) will improve the quality of health care, relieve acute care pressure points, and enable data generation to support patient, practice and community-level planning.
- Fund Allied Health Services in Residential Aged Care – we repeated our recommendations made in other forums for allied health to become an intrinsic part of residential care, provided at a level appropriate to each person’s needs.
- Improve Participant Utilisation of Allied Health Services in the NDIS – we also reiterated recommendations made in other forums to improve the utilisation of allied health services, which are vital to help NDIS participants maintain and improve function, build their capacity, and access assistive technology.
You can read our submission below: