Speak Out Dec 2016

From the President

Globally 2016 seems to have been a year of big events; the US election, Brexit, devastating earthquakes in New Zealand. For the speech pathology community we have seen Rosie Martin, Tasmanian Branch Chair, win Tasmanian of the Year, which places her in the nominations for Australian of the Year. My congratulations to Rosie - a much deserved award for her commitment to accessible services to all. The IALP conference was held in Ireland with Australian speech pathologists giving key notes and responded to key notes, as well as presenting many papers. Those are just two examples of Australian speech pathologists achieving high recognition of their contributions that have occurred over the year. In the Association, we have: • collected and established our aspirations for the profession in the Speech Pathology 2030 project. We have worked to embed and work towards the attainment of those aspirations in the development of the strategic plan from 2017-2019. • started to explore credentialing, what could it mean for the profession, and what does credentialing mean? • worked with State and Federal Ministers and the NDIA to resolve various issues with the NDIS – with a range of successes – and some ongoing work. We have continued to advocate across a broad range of areas including MBS items, school-age services, youth justice, mental health and aged care. • added to and updated our suite of clinical guidelines and position statements, • worked on a model of CPD for our members – ensuring we offer professional learning in a range of formats and cater to the range of experience and needs of our members, • continued to ensure that we are supporting our early career speech pathologists through support for quality supervision and mentoring, • continued to provide strong ethical support for members and robust protection for the public through our ethical standards, • worked with our members to promote the profession through Swallowing Awareness Day, Speech Pathology Week and Book of the Year, and • continued to work with the International Communication Project – developing a three year plan to ensure the message that communication is a basic human right is embedded throughout the world. My thanks to our dedicated, hard-working National Office staff, who have either worked directly on these initiatives, or on other day-to-day work of the Association that keeps everything moving so that we are able to continue to work towards our vision of effective communication and safe swallowing – a right for all Australians across their lifespan. I hope that you have a restful and invigorating summer holiday period, and that you return for 2017 ready to hurtle towards 2030!

Gaenor Dixon

Gaenor Dixon National President

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December 2016 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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