Establishing a multidisciplinary allied health primary care blended funding trial will enable the testing of scalable models of multidisciplinary care for diabetes, chronic pain, and stroke.
What is Osteopathy Australia advocating for?
The development and establishment of funding for a trial on multidisciplinary allied health primary care blended funding.
- These models should include both primary health network (PHN) commissioned and direct funded approaches to test the most effective way to fund multidisciplinary practice models
- Models should complement work being undertaken within general practice to create blended funding models for general practice teams.
- Models must be developed in consultation with allied health peak associations, Allied Health Professions Australia (AHPA) and other key stakeholders.
Why this benefits Australians
- Reduced costs for Australians accessing osteopathy care.
- Increase access to multidisciplinary care for all Australians.
- Reducing unnecessary burden on other health practitioners.
- A reduction in unnecessary hospitalisations.
Policy issues and barriers
- Lack of governmental investment into allied health and multidisciplinary teams.
- Limited access to Medicare funding for multidisciplinary allied health care.
- Allied health professionals often have communication and information sharing barriers due to difficulty in accessing digital health platforms that are also not fit for allied health use, limiting their ability to work as apart of multidisciplinary teams.