Sept '21 Newsletter - Impact of Covid and telehealth

Welcome to our first ever newsletter! We're thrilled to have you here 🤩

We hope you'll enjoy this first version where we discussed the impact of COVID-19 on Speech and Language Therapy, telemedicine platforms, conversational support for patients living with aphasia and the journey of teens with severe dyslexia celebrating beating the odds to succeed in GCSEs.

Let's build the future of speech and language therapy together! 🙌

Sept '21 Research Paper 🧐

"Impact of COVID-19 on the Speech and Language Therapy Profession and Their Patients"
published by Katie Chadd, Kathryn Moyse and Pam Enderby (full text available online here)

We noticed the following key data points
- 96% of RCSLT members surveyed said that the pandemic was having an impact on their professional roles, responsibilities and duties
- Among other things, 63% report an altered method of service delivery (e.g. remote delivery), 62% a reduction in routine clinical caseload and 51% a reduction in referrals for patient/client groups on routine caseload
- 75% reported that they did have patients who should be receiving intervention but who were not in April 2020, which increased to 84% in the second survey on August-September 2020
- Outcomes (change in the TOM for all the ROOT data for both time periods in 2019 and 2020) were largely positive and consistent in both cohorts

The authors note that "the “switchover” to telehealth has been one of the widest reported changes to healthcare in this period, despite its subsequent problematizing with regard to how this approach may exclude many patients without access to technology." 

We would be curious to hear your opinion: how did COVID-19 impacted your practice and your patients?
Tell us more about it on our community forum

Other news we've been reading 🤩

Not all heroes wear capes! Speech and language therapists are doing an amazing job to support patient with long Covid, as highlighted in this article: "The highly specialist speech and language therapist Sophie Chalmers coached her through various exercises to encourage deep breathing from the diaphragm"

Boston University graduate researcher Hasini Weerathunge wanted to find out if popular teleconferencing platforms used for telemedicine could capture sounds accurately enough for clinicians to successfully treat and evaluate patients with voice and speech disorders. Find out more here

Have you considered offering conversational support for patients living with aphasia? Here is how the new Bunbury group is doing it

We're inspired by the journey of teens with severe dyslexia celebrating beating the odds to succeed in GCSEs, more info here

‍