Why we recruit internationally

The problem we are actually solving

Southeast Queensland is one of the fastest-growing parts of Australia, and Ipswich is the fastest-growing city in the state. The number of children has risen far quicker than the number of clinicians trained to work with them.

The result is familiar to any parent who has rung around: waitlists measured in months, services that have closed their books, and a lot of families told to try again next term. For a three-year-old who is not talking, a year on a waitlist is a meaningful part of their early childhood.

We could wait for the domestic pipeline to catch up. It will not, quickly. So we recruit where experienced paediatric clinicians already exist.

Why the UK, Ireland and the United States

These are countries whose training is close enough to Australia’s that qualifications translate well, and whose health systems produce the kind of experience we are looking for.

• The United Kingdom and Ireland. NHS and HSE paediatric services are high-volume and multidisciplinary. A clinician who has spent years in a community paediatric team there has usually seen a far broader range of presentations than a comparable early-career clinician here, and is used to working alongside education and health colleagues rather than in isolation.
• The United States. Strong training in school-based practice and in early intervention, and considerable depth in specialist areas — feeding, AAC, paediatric neurology — where Australian depth is thinner.

Just as importantly, they are English-speaking systems with similar clinical cultures, which matters when the work is largely coaching parents and educators.

How registration works — and why you can rely on it

Coming from overseas does not lower the bar. Australia regulates this tightly, and the pathway is the same for everyone.

• Physiotherapists and occupational therapists must be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) before they can practise. Overseas qualifications are assessed against Australian standards, and registration can be verified publicly on the AHPRA register.
• Speech pathologists are certified through Speech Pathology Australia, which assesses overseas qualifications and awards Certified Practising Speech Pathologist status.
• Dietitians are credentialled through Dietitians Australia.
• Early childhood teachers are registered with the Queensland College of Teachers.

Every clinician we employ holds the relevant Australian registration or certification, along with a Working with Children Check (Blue Card). If you ever want to check a clinician’s registration yourself, ask us and we will tell you exactly where to look.

Why we deliberately hire experienced clinicians

Most practices recruit new graduates because they are available and cheaper. We do hire graduates, and we support them properly — but we weight our hiring towards experience, and that is a deliberate and more expensive choice.

The reason is simple. The straightforward cases are straightforward for anybody. What separates clinicians is the harder ground: a child who does not fit a textbook pattern, a family who has already been let down somewhere else, a situation where the right answer is to refer on rather than to keep seeing the child. That judgement comes from having seen a lot of children.

Experience also means less of your time spent explaining. A clinician who has worked with a hundred children with the same presentation can usually tell you in the first session what is likely going on, what they want to check, and roughly how long it tends to take.

What it means for your family

• Shorter waits, because there are more clinicians available than there would otherwise be.
• Continuity, because we sponsor people into long-term roles rather than filling gaps with locums.
• Depth, because overseas recruitment lets us hire for specific skills — feeding, AAC, developmental paediatrics — instead of taking whoever happens to be available locally.

You can read about our team on our about us page.