Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) across Forth Valley have now signed up to ASPIRE, a programme of future service delivery designed to give AHPs opportunities to play a bigger role in prevention and early intervention, as well as diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation across health and social care. It will also contribute to the delivery of Shaping the Future, NHS Forth Valley’s Healthcare Strategy 2016-2021.
ASPIRE is linked to the national strategy for AHPs and covers eight work streams including unscheduled care, acute, outpatients and mental health (rehabilitation and dementia). It sets out a new four tiered pyramid approach to service delivery ranging from enabling others at the bottom, generalist, specialist and advanced practice at the top. The aim is to open up access to services using enhanced triage to help people get the support and assistance they require. This includes work to introduce more competency based training to broaden out the range of people able to offer assessment and support and increase the number of staff working across traditional service boundaries to meet the needs of individuals.
NHS Forth Valley’s 500 plus AHPs work across a host of disciplines from dietetics, occupational and speech and language therapies to physiotherapy and radiography. Each year they treat 73,000 new patients, have 406,000 contacts annually and deal with 157,000 radiology attendances. For more details, read the aspire document on the publications section of the NHS Forth Valley website.
