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Introduction
In recent years burnout among health care professionals in Australia has become a very topical issue (Dobson et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2018). As such, the wellbeing of health professionals is a key concern for industry leaders and has been the topic of significant research attention. However, one major group within the healthcare sector, Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) has been broadly overlooked (Philip, 2015). Furthermore, AHPs often describe themselves as being less valued in the hierarchy than other professions (Mak et al., 2019; Rodwell and Gulyas, 2014).
AHPs are health care workers who are not considered part of the medicine, dentistry, or nursing professions. They provide specialised support across a diverse range of health services and are the second largest workforce in the healthcare sector (Allied Health Professions Australia, 2021). Allied health staff are faced with a range of unique challenges that predicates a need for more targeted research. Some of these challenges include navigating multiple identities with respect to their profession, the overarching allied health structure and to their interprofessional teams (Porter and Wilton, 2020). Further challenges reported by Mak et al. (2019) included AHPs perceptions of medical dominance and a lack of professional recognition within the healthcare context which was impacting their job satisfaction. In this paper we address this situation by investigating morale and burnout risk among AHPs. We explore this from the perspective of practising front-line managers responsible for managing AHPs working within a public hospital context.
Morale and burnout are particularly important in the health professions due to the cascading effects they can have on patient safety and the quality of care being delivered. Morale is defined as “a psychological state shared by members of a group that consists of feelings of satisfaction with conditions that impact on the group” (cited in Wood et al., 2012, p. 536). In other words, the group’s mood. Low morale in the workplace is known to lead to burnout which can have serious consequences on an employee’s mental health and wellbeing (Milner et al., 2016; Teo et al., 2021). Recently, the World Health Organisation (2019) recognised “burnout syndrome” as an official medical condition, defining it as:
a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic work-place stress that...