What happens
in Speech Pathology?
Our aim is for every client to have success in therapy and achieve their therapy goals. This requires the commitment of you and your child and your child’s therapist.
01
Initial Contact
When you first call or email us with an enquiry, our admin team will ask you some basic screening questions to determine your main concerns and then send you an intake form to determine your availability for appointments. You can also directly complete the intake form by clicking the link at the bottom of this page. This information is then used to match you to one of our speech pathologists (depending on availability and areas of expertise/experience).
02
Initial Consultation
After completing the intake form, you will be emailed a case history form. Once your form has been completed and submitted, an initial consultation appointment may be scheduled between you and the allocated therapist to gather further information regarding your concerns about your child’s skills, their personality and behaviour. Reports from other professionals will be reviewed. This meeting will assist our therapists better plan for the assessment session.
This appointment is dependent on the complexity of the client and not all clients require this appointment.
This appointment can be conducted via Telehealth (Phone or Zoom) or in person in the clinic and will be 15 minutes in duration. Your child does not need to be present during this session. This session is not billed and is included in the assessment rate.
03
Assessment Session
The assessment session will be between 60 and 120 mins. The length of time will depend on the child’s age, ability to focus/fatigue and your concerns (eg. speech, language, stuttering etc). The assessment may be split over two sessions if required. At the end of the session, the therapist will provide you with a summary of the preliminary assessment findings, however further analysis is required before the final results are given.
04
Service Planning Meeting
Following the assessment, the therapist will analyse the assessment data (eg. review audio/video files, collate scores etc) and collate the results into a written report. During the service planning meeting, the therapist will provide you with a report and explain the assessment results. Therapy goals will be discussed, and home practice expectations agreed upon. Each client is provided with a service agreement outlining the roles and responsibilities of the therapist and the client. This session ensures that you have all necessary information going forward and are ready to work as a team with your therapist to achieve your child’s goals.
05
Therapy Sessions
At the start of each therapy session, we review home practice data from the previous week. This allows us to observe home progress and identify which strategies were most helpful. This information provided by the parents/client then supports changes to the current therapy session to move to the next level of the therapy goal. It also allows us to problem solve any issues you may have encountered during home practice.
Therapy sessions are collaborative, with parents encouraged to participate in therapy tasks during the session. This is vital for parents to enable them to ‘be the therapist’ at home with their child. Your therapist will coach and guide you on how to support your child to achieve the subgoals they are working on in the session and then explain what is involved in continuing to practice this goal for homework.
Home practice is the key component to successful therapy and therapy gains. Home practice tasks are set after each session, and often are an activity that was practised within the therapy session. Skills will be practised in set tasks and/or daily living tasks.