Coming Together, Moving Apart: A History of the Term Allied Health in Education, Accreditation, and Practice

Journal of Allied Health, Spring 2008 by Donini-Lenhoff, Fred G

The current fragmentation and lack of identity for allied health professions may be a result of the breakup of CAHEA. A November 2,1959, memo printed in the Council on Medical Education agenda book warned against the possibility of fragmentation and deleterious effects on patient care, as allied health professions "develop more advanced professional skills and specialized competence" and move toward independent practice. At the same time, it is possible to overstate the AMA's centralizing influence on and control of allied health, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the professions were mature and ready to pursue their own direction, with or without physicians' blessing. Indeed, it is clear that some professions chafed against what was seen as outside control exerted by physicians through the AMA and CAHEA. For these fields, the potential "balkanization" of health care was a small price to pay for professional autonomy.

Today, the AMA continues to publish the Health Professions Career and Education Directory, which lists nearly 6,900 educational programs in 71 health professions (Table 3), as well as a monthly e-mail newsletter for allied health program directors, institutional officials, career counselors, and professional associations. The AMA also surveys the majority of programs in the directory each year to collect data on program enrollments, attrition, and graduates by gender and race/ethnicity; these data are published annually in the Health Pro/essions Education Data Book. In this work, the AMA works with the majority of accrediting agencies listed in Table 4, many of which were added to the directory after CAHEA was dissolved.

Current Efforts to Bring Focus to Allied Health Education and Practice

A number of organizations have attempted to advance a central identity and unity for allied health, as the AMA did through its accreditation of allied health education programs, or as CAAHEP continues to do today. In 1967, for example, ASAHP was formed, just one year after the passage of the landmark Allied Health Personnel Training Act of 1966, the first federal recognition of allied health. ASAHP changed its name in 1973 to the American Society of Allied Health Professions, in response to many requests by hospitals, clinical facilities, and professional societies for ASAHP to serve as "an organization representing the totality of allied health education and practice in the United States."21 In 1991, however, ASAHP returned to its original name and purpose, that is, representing allied health educators, not practitioners.

In 1994, HPN was formed, in part, to fill the void left by the transition of ASAHP to its original identity. HPN, with representatives from allied health professional organizations, provides a forum for collaboration among the professions on issues of common interest and advocates on behalf of allied health to the public, professional associations, and federal and state workforce analysts and policy makers. As with the current title of the AMA's directory, HPN intentionally avoided the word allied in its name to avoid limiting the organization's appeal to certain professions.