The Allied Health Scholar

Editorial Introduction to the Inaugural edition of The Allied Health Scholar: Kobie Boshoff, Steve Milanese, Helen Banwell and Janine Dizon

As an editorial team, we are proud to present this first issue of The Allied Health Scholar. The vision of the journal is reflected in this issue: to showcase the quality research of entry-level researchers, practitioners and students. We firstly thank the honours and PhD students and the practitioners whose hard work have resulted in this outstanding outcome and we hope that readers will find these publications inspiring and more importantly, useful. This first edition   speak of the combined strengths of the Allied Health field: with articles which include Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Podiatry, Speech Pathology and Social Work.

Articles illustrate Allied Health service provision across the lifespan and across different life roles: the profiling of occupational therapy neonatal intensive care services by McPharlin et al.; the collaboration of occupational therapy and early childhood education by Monaco et al,; early childhood service provision by Varvounis et al., physiotherapy students and clinical educators (Milanese et al.) and the impact of foot orthoses on foot health and endurance measures in the flat foot population (Banwell et al.).

The international Centre for Allied Health Evidence - iCAHE - represents a collective group of Allied Health professionals with a global initiative to improve the quality and safety of allied health practice. Our mission is to contribute to better health and wellbeing for all, through evidence-based real world interventions. We work locally, nationally and globally to create new knowledge and translate evidence into practice, partnering with researchers, clinicians, educators, policy makers, government, industry, professional and consumer groups and the broader community. As an editorial team, our vision for this journal started with a little idea which has grown into the journal we can present to you today, and which we are hoping will contribute to the progression of the Allied Health field (“From little things big things grow” – Paul Kelly, 1991).

We thank all reviewers and friends of the journal for your support and input whilst we developed and trailed the journal processes – without your support our first edition would not have been possible. Our reviewers especially have done an incredible job at providing supportive and constructive feedback to the authors, in order to strengthen their articles and enable them to be of publishable standard. We will be making further refinements to the journal for our 2^nd edition. For authors wishing to submit articles, please register with the journal to receive updates of the changes or keep an eye out for changes on our website.