Speech pathologists play an integral role within our community, helping adults and children with complex medical issues that impact their communication and swallowing abilities.
Tenille Rickards is a speech pathologist within our Child Health, Womens and Children team, and works with our younger patients across a range of communication needs. As part of Speech Pathology Week 2024, Tenille has shared with us a little bit about her role and why it is important.
What does a typical day look like for you?
A typical day will consist of a mix of appointment types - some assessment sessions and some therapy sessions. Some sessions are working on speech production, some are working on language development, some on stuttering and some on feeding difficulties. To ensure we provide the best service for our clients, we also liase a lot with other professionals, attend meetings, work on quality improvement projects and attend professional development.
What is the most rewarding part about your role?
There are SO many rewarding aspects: Improving a toddler's communication so that they aren't having daily tantrums out of frustration anymore, making a 4 year old's speech understandable to others so they can make friends at kindy or school, supporting a parent to help reduce their child's stuttering when they didn't know how to help them, supporting a Mum to be able to feed her infant.
The theme this year for Speech Pathology Week is “communicate your way” and focuses on how pathologists help people achieve all different communication goals. What does this mean to you?
At Child Health, it means we work in partnership with families to allow them to identify their goals and support them in working towards achieving them. We are not aiming to be the professionals who tell families what to do, we are there to listen to their concerns and work alongside them, using our knowledge about communication to support them to communicate in the way that is most effective for them. This may mean working on gestures or signs before words to give a young child a way to communicate their needs and reduce frustration. It could mean supporting a parent to identify the more subtle ways their child is letting them know their wants or needs other than using words and showing them how powerful it can be to follow their child's lead when they send these nonverbal messages.
Why is early intervention important?
Early intervention is so important for children to develop the communication skills they need to succeed not only at school, but also in their personal lives. The earlier a child receives the help they need, the better the outcomes will be.
What would you love people to know about your profession or common misconceptions you come across?
We see so many families that have raised concerns about their child's communication early on and been advised to 'wait and see'. However, we recommend families access services as soon as they have concerns. Yes, there are many children who may start out with speech and language issues that might be resolved without intervention, but there are also many children who will have great difficulty catching up without speech pathology support and waiting reduces their access to early intervention.
My advice would be to use the Speech Pathology Australia milestones as a guide Communication milestones (speechpathologyaustralia.org.au) and if your child isn't meeting these, book in and see a speech pathologist.
Child Health offers free screening assessments for children with speech and language delays (eligibility criteria apply).
For more information visit https://www.sunshinecoast.health.qld.gov.au/services/child-youth-and-family-health