Abstract
In an increasingly pressured primary and community care landscape, strategic focus is shifting toward interprofessional care models that can provide patient-centred care, strengthen collaborative working relationships within local communities and work toward Pae Ora (healthy futures). The scope of practice of physiotherapists mean they have potential to provide broad and timely quality care, and examples can already be seen of physiotherapists providing care in novel primary and community care spaces supporting high needs populations. There are further growth opportunities, the Comprehensive Primary Community and Rural Role Descriptions for Physiotherapists being a recent example, so how prepared are we as a profession to respond? The new government continues to indicate support to reform the health system and funding models in primary care continue to be in the spotlight alongside equitable health outcomes. To address this potential, this symposium focuses on two critical challenges: One, how can physiotherapists best engage with health funders and the public to clearly explain what services we could and should be offering to help tackle our current inequitable health service delivery and create robust proposals and business cases to support the argument? Two, physiotherapists working in these spaces require support to sustain and maintain their roles, skills and experience. How is this best achieved to grow the skills and capacity of these important primary care physiotherapy roles to provide best practice care for the communities that need it the most?