The Global Advanced Practice Summit
The Global Advanced Practice Summit (#GAHS2025) is a landmark event designed to bring together allied health professionals and nurses, researchers, policymakers, and educators from around the world. As healthcare systems respond to global demographic and health transitions—including a growing middle class, reduced infectious disease burdens, and rising rates of chronic illness—the demand for skilled health professionals is growing. The Summit provides a unique platform for collaboration, learning, and innovation, ensuring that health professions evolve to meet these changing needs.
Allied health has historically flourished in high-income, predominantly English-speaking countries, particularly former Commonwealth nations. However, as newer and emerging economies introduce allied health professionals to address their health system demands, many lack the infrastructure, education, and pathways to support advanced practice roles. This Summit bridges that gap by fostering global collaboration, elevating advanced practice, and creating equitable opportunities for professional growth across borders.
Why the Global Advanced Practice Summit is Important
The #GAHS2025 is not just another healthcare conference. It is a strategic effort to:
1. Advance Practice Roles Globally
Advanced practice has become a critical evolution in many health professions. For example, podiatry and optometry have started to incorporate prescribing of scheduled medicines into normal practice after decades of advocacy. Similarly, radiographers in the UK diagnose, while their Australian counterparts do not—despite similar levels of training.
These examples raise key questions:
- What happens when advanced practice becomes normal practice? Is this the natural evolution of a profession?
- What happens to practitioners who do not adopt advanced practice skills?
- If advancing practice a normal part of professional evolution, how do we streamline professional evolution in a way that optimises the effectiveness of healthcare delivery for patients?
- Is advanced practice restricted to specialised roles in urban settings and secondary and tertiary hospitals, or is it possible to have advanced practice in regional and rural settings, and for more generalist roles?
The Summit provides a platform to explore these questions, share strategies for advanced practice development, and identify ways to support professions as they evolve.
2. Promote Global Collaboration
Collaboration accelerates progress. For example, advanced practice roles can improve hospital outcomes, reduce waiting lists, and optimise patient flow—but this only happens when workforce planning is strategic, funded appropriately, and supported by infrastructure. The Global Advanced Practice Summit enables health practitioners from different professions and jurisdictions to share successful workforce strategies and innovations that raise the visibility, supply, and placement of allied health professionals.
Practical examples, such as Singapore’s ability to rapidly implement comprehensive Hospital at Home models (including diagnostic services like X-rays), show the power of aligned systems. In contrast, bureaucratic hurdles in highly complex health systems like Australia often stifle innovation. The Summit invites allied health leaders to collaborate on overcoming these challenges and driving change globally.
3. Bridge Gaps in Workforce Capacity
As health systems in emerging economies introduce allied health professionals to manage shifting health priorities, they often lack the support needed to develop advanced practice roles. This can include:
- Education pathways (e.g., advanced degrees, professional certification).
- Strategic workforce planning.
- Infrastructure and leadership structures to support role evolution.
The Summit fosters cross-border learning and provides professionals from emerging economies with access to global expertise, knowledge, and mentorship.
4. Foster Equity and Inclusion
Advanced practice must not remain exclusive to larger or wealthier professions and countries. Smaller professions, too, require opportunities for growth and innovation. The Summit highlights case studies of professions—such as podiatric surgery—that have struggled for recognition over decades, and showcases pathways to success.
Through targeted sponsorship, professionals from low and middle-income countries will gain access to the Global Advanced Practice Summit, ensuring their voices and innovations are included in the global dialogue.
5. Drive Innovation and Workforce Evolution
Change in allied health practice has often been slow and uneven. For example, the journey of podiatric prescribing in Australia took decades: from submissions to regulatory boards in the 1990s, to limited prescribing rights in 2014, to the first graduating cohort with prescribing endorsements in 2024 (fact check). Similarly, early podiatry graduates often faced misalignment between their education and practice expectations.
The Summit highlights what it takes to drive practice change: aligned education, regulation, funding models, and leadership. It will explore how systems can overcome resistance, avoid stagnation, and address the challenges of implementing advanced practice—without leaving practitioners behind.
6. Support Strategic Workforce Planning to Advance Practice
Strategic workforce planning is essential to optimise the contributions of allied health professionals. Leaders must:
- Raise Awareness: Advocate for the visibility and value of allied health roles.
- Ensure Adequate Supply: Develop pathways to train, recruit, and retain professionals.
- Secure Funding: Reform funding models—such as Medicare, activity-based funding, and NDIS—to enable allied health professionals to work to their full scope of practice.
- Drive Innovation: Collaborate globally to share workforce strategies, improve patient outcomes, and implement advanced roles effectively.
The Summit provides an opportunity to learn from others’ examples of what works, what doesn’t work, and identify exemplars that can help you enhance practice in your jurisdiction or organisation.
The Power of a Global Allied Health Network
At its core, #GAHS2025 is about building a network that drives workforce innovation and professional evolution.
The Summit provides:
- A Platform for Practice Change: Highlighting examples where advanced practice has transformed healthcare outcomes.
- A Call to Action for Systems Change: Addressing why some innovations, like prescribing or diagnostics, succeed in one jurisdiction but stagnate in another.
- Global Communities of Practice: A framework to share innovations, support workforce transformation, and ensure no profession or country is left behind.
Our Global Allied Health Network lets you continue these discussions with your peers and partners through monthly webinars, shared resources, online chat functions and round-table meetings.
The Format of the Global Advanced Practice Summit
#GAHS2025 has been designed as an inclusive, fully online event that spans 24 hours, ensuring global participation across all time zones. The format is interactive, flexible, and engaging, offering a variety of opportunities for learning, networking, and collaboration:
- Keynote Presentations: Delivered by leading global experts, keynotes are pre-recorded to ensure high-quality content delivery. Live Q&A opportunities are integrated throughout the 24-hour program, allowing attendees to interact directly with presenters and discuss key insights.
- Round-Table Discussions: These facilitated, real-time discussions bring together participants to share experiences, explore challenges, and identify solutions on critical topics, such as advanced practice, workforce strategy, and innovation.
- Asynchronous Content: Written and recorded content, including case studies, research insights, and practical tools, will be available on-demand for participants. This content is designed to complement live discussions and provide flexibility for attendees to engage at their own pace.
- Interactive Networking: Opportunities to connect with global peers, collaborate on shared interests, and build partnerships will be embedded throughout the event, fostering a strong sense of community.
This format ensures accessibility, inclusivity, and meaningful participation for allied health professionals across different regions and time zones.
Sponsorship as an Enabler of Inclusion
To ensure equitable participation, all sponsorship funding goes directly towards enabling access to participants from low-and-middle-income countries (as defined by the World Bank) to the Summit. This not only addresses workforce gaps in emerging economies but also fosters a circular exchange of knowledge, innovation, and ideas.
Sponsors play a critical role in:
- Empowering LMIC allied health professionals to engage with global learning and leadership.
- Ensuring equitable opportunities for advanced practice and capacity-building.
- Contributing to the creation of a stronger, more inclusive healthcare workforce.
Full details of sponsorship packages are available here.
Conclusion
The Global Advance Practice Summit is a pivotal event for the evolution of allied health professions worldwide. By fostering collaboration, advancing practice, and driving workforce transformation, the Summit addresses the critical questions of professional evolution, innovation, and equity. Whether exploring the impact of advanced practice, strategic workforce planning, or systemic barriers to change, #GAHS2025 offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of health professions globally.
Call to Action
Join us at #GAHS2025. Learn more about how the Summit is driving global workforce innovation, supporting advanced practice, and fostering equitable access for health professionals worldwide. To explore sponsorship opportunities that enable participation for low-and-middle-income health professionals, view our sponsorship prospectus and help us shape the future of healthcare.
Super early bird registration closes December 31st, 2024 – tickets available here.
Submit your abstract here.
Access sponsorship information here.
