ABSTRACT
Allied Health Professionals (AHP) provide healthcare in a wide variety of settings, for example hospital in-patient, out-patient, domiciliary, occupational health and schools. AHPs also work at different levels of authority ranging from undergraduate supervised practice through a range of autonomous clinical positions, expert and consultant practitioners and managerial posts. The chapter focuses primarily on the care pathway, although reference will be made to the all encompassing Integrated Care Pathway (ICP). It provides a step-by-step guide to developing both the integrated and care pathway versions developed following practical experience of developing, implementing and monitoring multi-disciplinary pathways with reference to a theoretical base. The equivalent to pathways in industry would be called by other names, possibly a combination of good practice, quality control plus a large portion of ongoing quality improvement and design modification. In healthcare a care pathway is viewed as a multi-disciplinary outline of anticipated care.
