Allied Health Activity: The Challenges of Legitimising and Prioritising Meaningful Work

With growing service demand and constrained budgets, allied health services across New Zealand hospitals are focused on prioritising high-impact and high-value care. To inform understandings of what constitutes “high-value care”, this study aimed to identify what allied health service activities are valued in a New Zealand District Health Board (DHB) setting. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore the perceptions of patients (n = 2), allied health staff (n = 4), and managers (n = 3) within one DHB as an exemplar. Following transcription, the data were analysed using conventional content analysis. There were differing perspectives between each participant group on high-value allied health care. Important allied health workplace activities were grouped into three categories: building relationships, providing meaningful allied health care, and backstage workplace activity. This research reveals the differences in perspective between what patients value and what organisations value. This tension may mean that allied health professionals struggle to prioritise and legitimise those aspects of care that matter most to patients.