Most healthcare professionals will have had to dabble in using some kind of telehealth platform over the last 18 months or so. And most of us will have had some reservations, or have colleagues who just weren’t sure about Zoom, Attend Anywhere, MS Teams or a number of other platforms we may have been asked to use. There has certainly been more research on this since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has focused mainly on the experiences of patients and comparing reliability and validity of assessments done F2F versus using teletherapy. The authors of this article explored the experiences of speech and language therapists. They recruited 38 speech and language therapists across Australia, who completed 116 formal assessments (the CELF-5) with their clients, using a telehealth platform (Coviu). They then asked the therapists to share their experiences by completing a survey after each assessment: 92% of sessions were rated as adequate or better, with very few sessions (2.5%) reported as being abandoned due to technical issues. In fact, teletherapy was considered time and cost efficient. The qualitative feedback also underlined previous recommendations on the importance of tailoring teletherapy to the individual, noting that, for some, the approach helped improve engagement and for others, it made it more difficult to engage. Replicating this data with speech and language therapists working with children and adults in the UK context could be extremely valuable, particularly where services may be delivered nationally.
Better or barrier: what do healthcare professionals think about teletherapy?
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