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The National Conference for Rural and Remote Allied Health
As a member-driven organisation, SARRAH is the home of the National Conference for Rural and Remote Allied Health, uniting allied health professionals from rural and remote areas to share knowledge, foster connections and advocate for solutions to the challenges of rural care delivery. Conference proceedings document the presentations, workshops and discussions shaping the future of rural allied health.

Signal & Noise: A pre-conference workshop
for rural allied health profesionals

This interactive workshop is designed to help allied health professionals understand not only why digital connectivity matters, but also how they can position themselves, their organisations and their technology investments to participate in Australia's future connected health system.
What it covers:
1. ADHA's national digital health agenda: Karen presents the current reform picture - My Health Record, Share by Default, the National Allied Health Digital Uplift Plan, and how interoperability underpins other major reforms rural AHPs are already living through, including aged care and primary care.
2. Two realities colliding: rural allied health is already stretched: workforce shortages, thin markets, patients travelling hours for care, services running on goodwill. When we layer the digital health agenda on top, a second set of known pressures appear: patchy connectivity, digital exclusion, systems that assume AHPs have time and bandwidth to learn and implement new digital approaches. Anna and Georgia ground both realities in 1-2 real rural scenarios, showing where digital connectivity can be an enabler or a barrier.
3. What success looks like: participants share real examples: moments digital health and connected care genuinely solved a problem for them / their patients (and what enabled this) and moments it added effort / reduced the quality of care (and what the barriers were). From these, the room builds toward a shared answer to: what should successful digital health and
connectivity look like for rural AHPs?

When: 2pm, 9 November 2026
Where: Pacific Bay Resort, Coffs Harbour

Registration is free, courtesy of the Australian Digital Health Agency

Note: This workshop is held in conjunction with the 16th National Conference for Rural and Remote Allied Health. You do not need to register for the conference to attend this preconference workshop.
  • Karen Booth
    Karen Booth is the Chief Clinical Adviser (Nursing) for the Australian Digital Health Agency, and is the immediate past president of the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association (APNA). She has worked as a primary health care nurse and manager in general practice since 1998, which included acute and preventative health care, chronic disease management, care coordination, data management, accreditation, administration, staff training and mentoring.

    Karen has more than 10 years’ experience in corporate governance and has held several board director positions. Karen is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
  • Dr Anna Moran
    Dr Anna Moran solves problems, makes plans, loves data, and drives a taxi for four children. Also: she pokes at the parts of rural health that don't work, then rebuilds them with the people who live inside the mess. Anna has spent twenty years across clinical practice, academia, policy and consultancy.
    30+ peer-reviewed papers later, she realised that they only earn their keep if they change what happens in rural practice, not just updating a reference list. Having lived the impact of poor service design from every angle, she decided to move into health-tech and is now co-designing a care coordination platform, UNPLEXi™, alongside support workers, rural providers, allied health professionals and people with disability and chronic health conditions. Anna is allergic to jargon and PowerPoint slides but professes she is prone to dreaming about spreadsheets and sentences she's proud of. She does Zumba badly but she does rural health design properly.
  • Dr Georgia Gosse
    Dr Georgia Gosse is a physiotherapist with experience delivering child and family centred care across rural and remote areas, including through fly-in-fly-out work. Combined with her own lived experience of growing up on a farm, this background has shaped her commitment to rural and remote health.
    Georgia's PhD reimagined models of care for children in rural and remote South Australia, drawing on qualitative methodologies to understanding the lived experience of families in these settings and inform the design of accessible, community-driven models of care. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland. Georgia remains committed to ensuring rural and remote communities are represented in all research, and to advancing models of care that promote health equity.
Register here