Breaking New Territory: Spotlight on Allied Healthcare
Allied health professionals (AHP) are integral to the effective delivery of healthcare across our system. They make up the third largest clinical workforce in the UK and have a key role in facilitating patient journey through acute care, hospital discharge, and care in the community. The influence of this mighty workforce crosses organisational boundaries, harnessing the expertise of 14 different clinical professions.
As a workforce playing a crucial role in service transformation, their contribution at the top table has been all too often marginalised and under promoted, with more weight carried by the voice of the nursing and medical workforce.
However, our system is thankfully starting to buck this trend. Our NHS and independent healthcare organisations are increasingly becoming more proactive in realising the importance of AHP representation at executive level, with the ultimate goal of unleashing the impact of our AHP workforce on how we deliver care both now and in the future. As we grapple with the pressures on our health system since the pandemic, keeping patients out of hospital and delivering care closer to home becomes more important than ever, and our AHP’s are front and centre in this battle. The need for representation of AHP’s at the highest level of organisational leadership has never been more critical.
Berwick Partners has recently been engaged in a rare opportunity to find a director of therapy and allied health professionals for Sirona care & health CIC, a large-scale community health provider in the South West. As a progressive organisation which faces distinct challenges in pulling together a variety of different services across a diverse geography, Sirona have realised the value in creating this new and exciting role to lead their AHP workforce. This assignment has been met with great excitement across the market, not least because it paves a more linear pathway into executive level leadership for ambitious and talented AHPs, where they have previously looked at dissociating from the professional roots in order to reach career goals.
Running a search like this can present distinct challenges. The number of individuals in the market who hold executive level AHP roles is minimal, so its essential the search process is setup to recognise transferrable experience, whilst also delving quite deeply into the suitability of each individual based on core skills. Our search process at Berwick is something we do ‘with’ our clients rather than ‘to’ them. Ensuring regular discussion at each stage allows for continuous feedback on an evolving picture, so that our understanding of potential candidates is thorough and balanced by the time we reach a shortlist.
It’s not just the clients that benefit, candidates are given the time to consider applications in great depth, raising questions and concerns where appropriate and accessing further informal discussions to learn more about the opportunity. We facilitate candidate’s expressions in written form, as well as verbal preliminary interviews and psychometric testing, adding multiple facets to their finished application.
For more information, please contact Gus Ferguson, Consultant in our Private Healthcare Practice.
