There is increasing recognition that AHPs are an integral part of the public health workforce with over 70,000 AHPs in the UK and over 4 million contacts per week. With this in mind the AHP Public Health Strategy Framework document 2019-2024 was developed, which acknowledges the role of AHPs to improve population health and reduce health inequalities with public health being a core element of what they do. It focuses around 5 goals to enable AHPs to improve population health.
As Prosthetists and Orthotists, we work across many sectors and have the potential to add value to public health priorities. We often work with people over a life course which allows us to develop a rapport with the people who utilise our services and we routinely incorporate questioning around healthy lifestyles and wellbeing in our assessments.
In this tea time talk we will introduce you to the domains of Public Health and the Framework document and examine how we can incorporate and routinely record our population health interventions or improve our services to ensure they are equitable.