Speak Out OCTOBER 2021 DIGITAL EDITION

continual desire to improve our knowledge and practice. We’ve had some amazing experiences too, such as being invited by Professor Margot Prior and Royal Children’s Hospital International, to go to Vietnam in 2009 & 2010, and provide training for the staff at the Autism Clinic at the National Hospital of Paediatrics in Hanoi. It was such an honor to have been asked by the renowned Professor Margot Prior who was critical in the development of autism research and clinical services in Australia and worldwide. What we took to our practice was an experience of working in a multidisciplinary team with a depth of experience and we’ve always wanted to achieve that in our private practice as well. We want our team to have a depth of knowledge to draw upon. So, we want early career therapists to be formally supervised by highly skilled senior therapists, but also to have opportunities for incidental “corridor conversations”. The support provided by more experienced therapists is something you can’t easily get if your early career therapists are always on the road. It’s very hard to achieve this practically at times, but it’s very important to us. We are so fortunate to be able to work with our amazing team of passionate, committed, and dedicated speech pathologists. How do you do autism diagnosis in your clinic? Our referrals usually come from paediatricians, who have usually conducted a developmental and medical history. Generally, we book in two extended sessions, where standardised language assessments and social communication checklists are completed as well as a dynamic assessment of play and conversation, along with parent interview. Then, depending on how much information is gathered from other key people in the child’s life, a further visit may take place in another environment such as school. Once the language, communication and social communication skill profile has been formed, the speech pathologist liaises with the paediatrician and psychologist regarding the assessment and a report is completed. How do you train a new staff member to perform autism assessments? We reserve this role for senior speech pathologists in the team. We do a lot of training and upskilling in this area, such as differential diagnosis in autism. There is also specific training we do for early career speech pathologists from the beginning, on identification of autism in the early years, as well as identification in girls and later diagnoses of older children and adolescents. As well as this, we recognize the importance of listening to the neurodiverse community and the perspective of people with lived experience to help with diagnosis and to help with our understanding into the future. Each school holidays, we run groups based on the children’s interests with a focus on connection,

communication and play. The team works together to plan the groups and then jointly run the program. This provides a rich learning opportunity for early career therapists to observe how different clinicians work, and how children respond to different experiences. How do you currently use the National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia? We are passionate about evidence-based practice and the role of speech pathologists in working in multidisciplinary teams. Because we have been working in extended multidisciplinary teams for so long, we have really informed our diagnostic partners of the role of speech pathologists. Our role includes assessing functional communication, social and pragmatic language, and where appropriate formal language assessment as part of the differential diagnostic process. As the National Guideline for Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia has rolled out over time, paediatricians may ask us to conduct the assessment of functioning component of an assessment if it is a single clinician diagnosis, or as part of the team conducting the consensus diagnostic assessment ( see FAQ) . How can the NDIS support private practices to be more sustainable into the future? It would be great if the NDIS could recognise and possibly remunerate private practices to train student speech pathologists. The recognition of private practice as a viable and important sector for training speech pathology students would help to ensure the sustainability of the workforce and quality services into the future. Currently some private practices do this for free at their own expense and for some it’s not always possible. How do you think you have managed to keep your business open for 20 years? It’s driven out of our passion - to provide the best possible speech pathology interventions for families that we can, and that underpins everything that we’ve done. It’s critical to be strongly committed to fostering that same level of excellence in clinicians at all stages, and building each other up, and making sure that there is an upwards career path in private practice. We can’t speak highly enough of our resilient and dedicated team at Spectrum Speech who in these Covid times have risen to the challenge of providing amazing and creative therapy online. We passionately believe speech pathology is critical for empowering autistic people and their families and helping them live their best lives.

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October 2021 | Speak Out