JCPSLP Vol 23 No 3

Creative clinical education

The Playroom@USYD: How to SuCEED on an innovative community outreach clinical placement in lockdown Annie Chan, Alison Purcell, and Donna Thomas

COVID-19 impacted the availability and type of clinical placements offered to speech- language pathology (SLP) students. Consequently, new placement opportunities were required. This paper presents the use of the NSW Model of care to underpin the development of The Playroom@USYD, an innovative community health care outreach placement for novice and advanced SLP students. The SuCEED (Supporting Clinical Education Excellence Development) model of clinical learning is introduced using first principles of clinical education and its use within The Playroom@USYD is explored. The success of The Playroom@USYD is considered from the perspectives of the clients, students and clinical educators. C OVID-19 and the associated public health orders resulted in widespread changes in education from early childhood to tertiary level during 2020 and 2021. While schools and universities ensured learning continuity by pivoting to online, remote and home schooling, young children who were unable to attend their early childhood education centres experienced significant reduction to learning. The restrictions that included stay- at-home orders disrupted traditional speech-language pathology (SLP) placements across hospitals, community health, schools, and private clinics. This meant that for a large portion of 2020, and in some Australian states, also in 2021, many in-person clinical placements pivoted to telepractice (Beiting & Nicolet, 2020; Krahe et al., 2021). However, not all placements could be converted to telepractice. Community placements that focused on public health care interventions in settings such as preschools were not feasible when children were not in attendance. As a result, these types of placements for speech- language pathology students were disrupted or cancelled. Consequently, there was a substantial gap in community access to speech pathology services, and a concurrent loss of speech pathology student-learning. As a result, The Playroom@USYD was designed as an innovative alternative experience for 2nd (novice) and 4th year (advanced) speech-language pathology students and for preschool children. This paper presents three things: (a)

our innovative student placement, The Playroom@USYD; (b) the pedagogical principles that underpin successful student placements, by introducing the SuCEED model; and (c) a framework for developing new clinical services, using the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovations’ Model of Care. The innovative placement—The Playroom@USYD The Playroom@USYD was a student-led community outreach health care program via telepractice with the objective of primary health care access for preschool-aged children impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. The new placement model involved students hosting a free livestreamed language enrichment program for 3–5 year old children at home and the production of educational videos hosted on YouTube (Chan, 2020). The program aimed to enrich language learning in the home environment via interactive and asynchronous activities. First, children aged 3–5 years old logged on to Zoom for a 30-minute “session” and interacted directly with speech-language pathology students. Second, a set of educational and parent training videos based on these sessions were produced and made available publicly via YouTube to further support these families and the wider community. The program ran for blocks of six weeks every semester. A different theme was assigned to each week (e.g., in the garden, space). Multiple sessions were conducted each week of the block. Each session consisted of short activities that addressed language and early literacy goals including vocabulary, narrative skills, print awareness and phonological awareness. The goals and activities were guided by the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and loosely inspired by the Read-It-Again Foundation Q program, developed by Laura Justice and Anita McGinty (CraneCentreOSU, 2021) and adapted to the Australian curriculum. Novice students were paired and allocated to a session time as hosts. They were observed by another pair of novice students who were their peer reviewers. The pairs alternated hosting and reviewing duties each week throughout the six-week block. Each pair of host students made a video recording of their activities after their live sessions. Advanced students managed technology issues, monitored the live sessions, and gave feedback post- session. They also edited and produced short educational

KEYWORDS CLINICAL EDUCATION COMMUNITY OUTREACH FIRST PRINCIPLES INNOVATIVE PLACEMENT

STUDENT LEARNING

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER- REVIEWED

Annie Chan (top), Alison Purcell (centre) and Donna Thomas

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JCPSLP Volume 23, Number 3 2021

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology