Who are the NHS Lanarkshire AHPs?
In Lanarkshire, the allied health professions (AHPs) consists of dietitians, occupational therapists, orthotists, physiotherapists, podiatrists, diagnostic radiographers, and speech and language therapists. However, in Lanarkshire, audiology and spiritual care are also aligned to the Lanarkshire AHP cohort.
What is AHPs Day?
AHP day is an invitation to join allied healthcare professionals to celebrate AHPs Day (#AHPsDay & #AHPSDayScot), which is taking place on Saturday 14 October 2023.
As with previous years, we join with other allied health professionals in a day of collective action.
The first ever AHPs Day was held in October 2018 to celebrate, appreciate and recognise the extraordinary work of the AHP workforce. In 2019 we were all about sharing why we were proud to be an AHP and joined by AHPs from across the globe including Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, making it a truly international social movement.
In 2021, the value of coming together globally as an allied health professional community was a key aspect of the day. Last year gave us the opportunity to celebrate and share what a positive impact we can make to people’s lives and the way we have adapted our practice as we began our recovery from the pandemic.
This year offers us the opportunity to continue to recognise the impact of AHPs but also to acknowledge the importance of supporting the health and wellbeing of not only ourselves, our colleagues and teams, but those we provide services to. It’s also a great opportunity to celebrate those AHPs who provide services across seven days and not just Monday to Friday!
Peter McCrossan, NHS Lanarkshire director for allied health professions, said, “I have never been prouder of the NHS Lanarkshire AHP team for the commitment and dedication shown over the past year. Staff continued to support numerous final year AHP students to enable them to complete their courses and graduate.”
This year the four key areas of focus will continue to be:
Celebrating who we are as allied health professionals, the people we work with and the impact we can make every day. Why not have a virtual get together to share and celebrate all your successes – you choose how! #celebrate
Appreciating our skills and impact on care and support in our local communities is important. Do you have local stories to share? Maybe you will be hosting AHP appreciation awards? We know relationships and people are at the heart of everything we do, why not use the day to day to just say thank you, reflect on how we look after our own health and wellbeing and the people we work with. #appreciate
Inspiring our future workforce and ensuring we can continue to grow an AHP workforce fit for the future is everyone’s responsibility. Why not use this theme to support people looking into a career as an AHP, a career of choice. You could share how you are inspiring our future workforce or maybe how you are offering new and innovative models of practice placements #inspire
Connecting with others. What relationships and conversations do you need to be engaging in to plug AHPs into workforce transformation and pathway redesign in your system? How are you connecting research with clinical practice? How are you sharing success and joining the dots on quality improvement and local and national policies? How are you connecting across the system on the shared ambition and aspiration of Scotland’s National Performance Framework? #connect
On the day itself, we are aiming for #AHPsDay to be a social movement. AHPs seek to share the hashtags #AHPsDay & #AHPsDayScot on social media and get the AHPs trending on social media platforms.
Resources are available here:
