Speak Out August 2020 DIGITAL EDITION

Branch News

Northern Territory

The view on our way into the Daly Region

Return to community life The Community Allied Health Team (CAHT) is team of allied health professionals (based in both Darwin and Katherine) who work alongside people of all ages in the Top End communities of the Northern Territory. We provide practical support within cultural frameworks to allow people to develop, live and age well in a life that is meaningful to them. Our teams travel to the remote Aboriginal communities via car and plane, providing allied health services for clients in some very beautiful but difficult to reach locations. Like many other teams during times of COVID-19 our work drastically changed. Due to the vulnerability of our clients, travel ceased to ensure the integrity of the communities and maintain the safety of the residents. While there are always interesting aspects to our day to day work, with attacking donkeys and cheeky dogs to name a few, we were now presented with a new opportunity…telepractice! Whilst we had the technology for telepractice, this was not a space in which many of us felt comfortable or had used much. So as a team we threw ourselves into professional development and explored the world of technology, considering how to fill the gap and continue to provide an effective service to our clients during these uncertain times. We were now faced with the new barriers of varying technology, how to work with clients with English as a second, third or even fourth language over telepractice and increasing our reliance on services such as health clinics, aged care centres and schools to help find the clients, organise technology and provide support on the ground. We had some successes including the unintentional outcome of GPs being involved with dysphagia assessments via telepractice, and this gave us a great opportunity to provide upskilling on dysphagia. Some of the communities we visit do not have internet or phone access, so we had to be more creative in our service delivery for these clients through videos taken and emailed or texted to us. For some clients, we were able to provide a timelier, multidisciplinary service than we could provide pre-COVID-19 when we were travelling all of the time. COVID-19 restrictions forced us to quickly change our service delivery model, and while this was challenging and unsettling to begin with, we have all come out being much more confident and competent in using telepractice. We have now started travelling again, which we are all very happy about. Our service will remain as a face-to-face delivery service, but we are going to continue to have telepractice in our toolbox of service delivery options and explore our scope to deliver services in the future. The CAHT Speech Pathology Team

NT 76 members as at July 2020

Story time at Galiwin’ku Outreach School

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Speak Out | August 2020