ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the renaissance in allied health influence has occurred and to demonstrate how organisation can be used as a shared strategic resource by the professions to accomplish better outcomes than they could obtain from working separately. Healthcare systems are complex entities. Smaller health professions with few resources at their disposal for engaging with large government bureaucracies face significant challenges. The Australian story has shifted from one of uneven change with early pockets of opportunism and enthusiasm coexisting with resistance and traditionalism in the late 1980s, to a situation of explicit recognition by the professions of the need to work together within the rubric of ‘allied health’ by the mid-1990s. The Australian healthcare system is complex due to the geographical distances involved in the provision of health services, the burden of federal-state relations in the organisation and funding of healthcare and the mixed nature of public and private sector services.
