Speak Out Feb 2017

Association news

Early Career Reference Group Resources for early career clinicians in private practice

population, the Lidcombe Program course would be useful for skill development.

The Early Career Reference Group is a team made up of 11 early career speech pathologists as well as team members from Speech Pathology Australia. This group is working together to develop resources to guide and support early career clinicians. We recently received an email from Dasha Kolesik at Say Hooray Speech Pathology that posed the question: “How could a small private practice owner/manager best support an early career SP? There are resources that I’ve utilised from the SPA website but I’d love to hear from direct input from some SPs. If by any means this isn’t possible, I completely understand, but otherwise it would be insightful to see the response.” Dasha Kolesik at Say Hooray Speech Pathology. “What a wonderful email to receive! It is useful to both new graduate clinicians and their employers to understand resources and strategies to best support early career employees. “From your email we can see that you have accessed Speech Pathology Australia’s Early Career Support page that provides resources for speech pathology students and early career employees. “Your question was posed to the Early Career Reference Group, which is made up of 11 early career speech pathologists and the following ideas were suggested: • Having a meeting between employer and early career SP to understand the expectations and entitlements of the role including caseload, supervision and professional development. This should be reviewed regularly to encompass changing expectations. • Regular supervision for the early career SP that allows the SP to develop goals for learning and strategies to achieve the goals. This supervision should be guided by the SP and can involve individual supervision or a combination of individual, group and peer supervision. “Supervision should guide the early career SP in professional development opportunities based on caseload and personal needs and requirements. For example, if the early career SP feels he/she needs to develop stuttering skills for the preschool Our email response to this was as follows:

“The Early Career Member Community on Facebook will be used to disseminate information and provide discussion regarding issues relating to Early Career Speech Pathologists. “Thank you for getting in contact with our team and we hope to regularly include information in Speak Out regarding the resources we are developing for employers and early career speech pathologists.” If you would like to pose a question to the Early Career Reference Group, please join the Early Career Member Community on Facebook.

Go to www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au members early career support.

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February 2017 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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