Speak Out February 2021 DIGITAL EDITION

What do the new Professional Standards mean for our work in prevention and promotion? A unique role

Kym Dunstan and Helen Smith (pictured) hold roles with the Centre for Children’s Health and Wellbeing (CCHW), Children’s Health Queensland and Health Service. CCHW is a multi-disciplinary team which focuses on improving health equity, particularly for vulnerable children, by addressing the social determinants of health (including housing, family, community support, education, play). Their roles bring together the evidence around social determinants and the importance of the early years. They apply their speech pathology perspective to develop strategies and responses to improve speech and language development, social emotional wellbeing, school readiness and ultimately lifelong health and wellbeing for all children. They don’t have a clinical caseload. Instead they plan, implement and evaluate evidence-based speech pathology promotion and prevention interventions and work in partnership with a range of stakeholders. What is the impact of the Professional Standards on your work? We are excited to see the Professional Standards reflect the profession’s more recent expansion into this type of work, and we can see how this document can be used to: • raise the profile of prevention and promotion within speech pathology • advocate for prevention and promotion services within other sectors • expose our future workforce to this way of working before they graduate. The new Professional Standards recognise that a speech pathology role may include: • Sharing your knowledge and strategies with parents in relevant and accessible ways, considering health literacy levels and parent messaging frameworks. • Contributing to service design by sharing what

Kym Dunstan and Helen Smith

• Building community capacity by supporting your local playgroup facilitator and linking families on your caseload with this group. • Increasing public awareness of communication difficulties by sharing information at your library, childcare centre or parent information session. • Working with universities to share/embed promotion and prevention information with our upcoming workforce. • Building capacity of parents and others involved in supporting child health and wellbeing. • Partnering with local communities to share information and plan responses to promote child development. • Organising community events focused on literacy development and health and wellbeing. What is prevention and promotion? Prevention and promotion aren’t new. However, it’s a relatively unexplored area for speech pathology in Australia. Prevention and promotion are about optimising individual and population outcomes. For Helen and Kym, this means optimising communication development and outcomes, using multiple behaviour change or improvement strategies.

you know about your local community, it’s vulnerable groups and issues impacting on accessibility to services.

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Speak Out | February 2021