Bridging Allied Health Professional Roles to Improve Patient Outcomes in Rural and Remote Australia: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

PURPOSE: Australia’s rural and remote populations experience inequality of access to healthcare, with demand exceeding capacity for delivery of health services, often due to a maldistribution of the health workforce. A strategy which may overcome barriers to accessing adequate healthcare includes implementation of interdisciplinary collaborative teams, identified as a successful method of healthcare delivery. This study thus aimed to explore interdisciplinary allied health collaborative practice in a rural community. METHODS: Role theory, as a philosophical perspective, was used to explore role perceptions and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between pharmacists and allied health professionals including dieticians/public health nutritionists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists, by conducting 29 interviews in a rural community. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, coded, and categorised into emerging themes. RESULTS: Five constructs of role theory were used to describe the data: role identity, role overload, role sufficiency, role conflict, and role ambiguity. Participants identified as rural generalists and health promoters, who work within innovative and adaptive healthcare settings. Role overload was reported as considerable due to high demand for services and a lack of resources in rural and remote regions, resulting in poor role sufficiency. Overall, there was a low level of role conflict, and participants were highly in favor of interprofessional collaboration; however, uncertainty of the pharmacist’s role (role ambiguity) was a major barrier identified. Health professionals with more years in practice provided few examples of how they would utilise a pharmacist in their practice, although these gave valuable insight into the potential integration of a pharmacist into an interdisciplinary health team, with allied health professionals. CONCLUSION: This study has applied role theory providing a greater understanding of the enablers and barriers of pharmacists working within interdisciplinary allied health teams and highlighting opportunities to bridge interprofessional roles to improve patient outcomes, especially in rural and remote communities.