Speak Out June 2021

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Speech pathologists of the future supporting remote practitioners

Our client community Our client community is not based in one location, but is dispersed, with clients living across all states and territories of Australia. Distance is no barrier when you access services online via telehealth, so a client might be in a major city like Sydney or on an island off the Northern Territory. Most of the clients we work with are from rural or regional areas with a significant number living in remote or very remote areas with limited access to allied health services. Our clients seek services via telehealth for a range of reasons such as, reducing the time and cost to get to appointments, increasing the access and frequency of one or more services or just because they find it more convenient for family or other reasons. Our practitioner community Our practitioner community is equally dispersed across all states and territories of Australia. Therapy Connect has no head office, in fact no office at all. All of our practitioners work from their home based offices at their various locations. “Our practitioner team is located all over Australia from the Torres Strait in the north, through the eastern states and across the south to include SA and WA,” Sue explained. “Our practitioners are predominantly

Therapy Connect is a dedicated allied health telehealth business founded in 2015, at a time when the NBN was starting to reach into rural and remote areas and when the NDIS was in the early stages of providing individualised funding for people with disability. The idea of giving people with disability, choice and control about how to use their funding is a worthy concept, but for people in rural and remote areas, there were no private providers and no services to purchase. Therapy Connect is the brainchild of two rural allied health practitioners who understand, first hand, the impacts of poor access to services. Sue Cameron a speech pathologist from Western Victoria and Simone Dudley, an occupational therapist from the Riverina, NSW have the lived experience of long waiting lists for services and the need to take time off work to travel long distances to access them. Starting with just Sue and Simone providing therapy exclusively online, Therapy Connect has grown to a team of more than 50 highly experienced allied health practitioners delivering speech and occupational therapy, psychology, dietetics, physiotherapy and social work to clients of all ages living anywhere in Australia (and even some overseas).

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Speak Out | June 2021