The depth and breadth of allied health clinical expertise at Northern Health was recently showcased through involvement in the Allied Health Clinical Education Network (AHCEN) complex case series webinar on Functional Neurological Disorders.

These webinars provide free education and training to allied health professionals across Victoria, with the format developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when face-to-face training opportunities for all health professional ceased. The sessions were primarily designed to support early career allied health professionals and focus on facilitated case discussions. They also provide experienced interprofessional panel of allied health professionals with the opportunity to problem-solve and discuss their reasoning behind clinical decisions.

Justine Slattery, Allied Health Education Lead at Northern Health, is part of the team that organises and facilitates these webinars. Ms Slattery reflected on the positive contribution that the Northern Allied Health team have made to these webinars.

“Over the last couple of years, we have delivered six webinars and Northern Health allied health staff have been represented in four of these as either facilitators, panellists or both,” Ms Slattery said.

The demand for this model of professional development doesn’t appear to have waned post-pandemic. On average, over 500 allied health professionals have registered for each of these events over the last two years.

September’s webinar on Functional Neurological Disability attracted over 1,000 allied health professionals – exceeding the team’s capacity for online meetings.

Expert allied health professionals from across different health services, including Northern Health, spoke at the webinar, with Rachel Nolan, Senior Speech Pathologist, representing Northern Health on the panel.

Ms Nolan’s involvement in the co-design and delivery of this webinar provided the opportunity for her to network with different allied health professionals from other health services, including Royal Melbourne Hospital, Epworth, Austin Health and Barwon Health.

“It was a great opportunity to network and learn from other experts that are passionate about working in this field. We collaborated in the planning meetings for this webinar to ensure it reflected our joint interests in Functional Neurological Disorders and desire to share our learnings and experiences with early career professionals,” Ms Nolan said.

Northern allied health clinicians involved in previous complex case webinars include:

• Stephen Quick (Allied Health Education & Physiotherapy), Navigating the inpatient continuum of care for older people with frailty and cognitive impairment: the importance of the multidisciplinary team webinar (2023)
• Ingrid Ioannidis, Northern Health NDIS Lead was a panellist on the 2023 CCS NDIS and Disability webinar.
• Christina Lambros (Senior Paediatric Physiotherapist), Early Allied Health Intervention to Optimise Neurodevelopment in High-Risk Infants (2022)

“Being a panellist was a wonderful opportunity to not only share our specialist knowledge with a large audience across health services but it provided the opportunity to collaborate with other specialists to plan the event. Being a panellist in the event highlighted one of Northern Health’s values of working together,” said Ms Ioannidis.

The webinar format is an accessible way for early career allied health professionals to gain insight into the roles and contributions of allied health professionals, fostering a better appreciation of teamwork and enhancing outcomes for patients presenting with increasingly complex presentations.

Learner feedback from September’s webinar suggest it is hitting the mark – “This was by far one of my favourite PD I’ve attended all year! The host was great! I loved the way it was presented.”