Connecting with allied health professionals
Yvonne Pettigrew is seconded as the National Clinical Lead for the Allied Health Profession (AHP), into the multi-professional Clinical Division at the Department of Health Informatics Directorate. She works with the National AHP Information Strategy Taskforce (NAHPIST) representing and enabling the views of AHP professional bodies, regulators, educators and others with interest in the impact of informatics. As well as advising on policy, system design and implementation, Yvonne also has open dialogue with many AHP representative groups, attends and speaks at events and conferences around the country, and contributes to committees.
Her role is to reach out to allied health professionals, connecting them with practical support and resources and ensuring that the new technologies reflect and support rapidly changing professional practice.
National Clinical Lead for allied health professionals
Yvonne Pettigrew is Associate Director for Allied Health Professionals and Head of Therapy Services at the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB). Yvonne's previous roles include clinical work as an Occupational Therapist in the acute and community sectors as well as with social services. She has also spent a period of time in an American hospital in the Middle East. Most recently Yvonne has had senior management and professional leadership responsibility in multi-centre and teaching hospital environments.
Yvonne has always had an interest in the appropriate use of technology to improve clinical services and is especially keen to see Allied Health Professional (AHP) clinical and commissioning recording integrated meaningfully at patient and organisational levels. She commented: "Now more than ever AHPs need to feel able to harness technology and information in the way they deliver their services and shape them to meet the needs of their service users"
"Choose and Book is a great example of a tool that can enable GPs to know about our services and enable patients to be offered an AHP service as a choice. NHS Choices can offer a portal for service users to find and understand what our services offer and access information from AHPs on healthy living and self management of chronic conditions. We also need to ensure that we maximise the benefits for practitioners by using service users feedback, performance data and clinical outcomes to help develop a system which both reflects their needs and enables better inter-professional working.
"I will do this via our national conferences, existing professional networks and by responding to individual enquiry. I'm very keen that we get better at sharing good practice as there are so many exciting and innovative examples that could benefit our patients."