Telepractice providing support for the children with speech or/and language disorders: experiences of Lithuanian speech and language therapists'

Abstract

Research objective - to reveal the views of speech and language therapists (SLT) providing speech and language therapy services for the children with speech or/and language disorders via telepractice in Lithuania. Methods. The research was based on a mixed research methodology. A survey (semi-structured questionnaire) was carried out in 2020 within the context of quarantine due to Covid-19. Lithuanian SLTs (N=90) working mainly in educational settings participated in the research. Results. Experiences of SLTs shows that synchronous therapy was the most common type of telepractice. SLTs mainly worked directly with children individually and consulted their parents. Asynchronous or hybrid telepractice were used at least. Use of telepractice varied across different age and disorders in children. According to SLT opinion, telepractice was mainly not a possible way of service delivery for the early age children, but success was expected working with pre-school and primary school age children who have written language, developmental language and fluency disorders. Therapy provided via telepractice for the children who have developmental disabilities or feeding and swallowing disorders were defined as ineffective. Before Covid-19 telepractice was rarely used in the country, but forced changes of practice disclosed some advantages: accessibility of services for more clients, flexible time schedule of services and individually provided therapy. During this period of practice, the main advantage was increased collaboration with parents including both their motivation to be involved in therapy and raised competence to support their children. Also, SLTs improved competences to use e-recourses and ICT in their professional activities. Increased time resources of planning of therapy via telepractice was the main challenge identified by SLTs. According to them, for some groups of clients services delivered via telepractice were not useful, it was difficult to reach all the aims and perform all roles of SLTs, because of the lack of physical contact. Conclusions. SLTs’ experience,imposed by the Covid-19 quarantine situation, meaningfully changed their attitudes to the use of telepractice in their professional work.