Influence of Positional and Personal Power on Allied Health Change Implementation in Regional Public Healthcare: An Exploratory Study.

Objective: Evidence-based healthcare innovations are changes that improve the ability of a health service to meet healthcare needs, optimise healthcare system performance, and are proven to be effective via formal research findings. Allied health's ability to lead and implement healthcare innovation is frequently overlooked at the organizational level. This study aimed to explore the experiences of regionally based Australian allied health (AH) leaders who pursue evidence-based innovation at the organizational level.

Methods: An exploratory, qualitative phenomenological methodology was used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 10 regional AH leaders from one regional Australian health service. Data were analyzed using the Framework approach.

Results: Two major themes were identified: 1) drivers for innovation: increasing value for patients and AH professions; 2) Power of AH influences organizational uptake of AH innovations. Two subthemes were associated with each major theme.

Conclusions: This exploratory study found that for AH in regional Australia to effectively engage in change implementation and deliver healthcare innovations, they must both understand and utilize strategies that enhance their personal power and leverage their positional power within their organization. Individual factors such as confidence, knowledge of change management and implementation science, as well as organizational hierarchy and how organizations value AH influenced the experiences of AH leaders pursuing innovation. Health services seeking strategic, innovative service delivery should facilitate increased executive-level AH representation to ensure AH has equitable positional power with other health disciplines.