Challenging Remote Community Deficit Perspectives: An Australian Insight into the Role of These Communities in the Design of Their Health Services and the Development of Their Health Workforce

Abstract

This article reports on findings from a qualitative study that explored the formation of a community-campus partnership, development and delivery of an allied health practice-based service-learning program, and impacts of partnership and program participation for community and campus participants. The partnership sought to address a protracted lack of access to allied health services for children residing in remote Australia. The program aligned occupational therapy and speech pathology student placements to the provision of allied health services to these children. Community participantsschool principals and senior managers from local facilitating agencies, and campus participantsallied health students and academics were allocated to focus groups, school principals (n = 7) and allied health students (n = 10), and individual semi-structured interviews, senior managers (n = 2) and academics (n = 2). A constant comparative analysis method was used to analyse data. This article describes community perspectives of partnership initiation, catalysts for participation, and participation impacts. The role of community partners in initiating the partnership was described and conditions associated with remote contexts and health sector failures were identified catalysts. Service and learning adaptation, partnership commitment and service consistency, service acceptability and accessibility, and community investment in remote health workforce development were identified impacts. This article addresses significant gaps in the national and international practice-based service-learning literature, specifically from community and remote perspectives. Study limitations are discussed and implications for how community-campus partnerships are formed and service-learning programs are sustained in remote contexts are explored.

Design and delivery of an innovative speech pathology service-learning program for primary school children in Far West NSW, Australia

“…Parental support was very high -up to 100% in some schools -and scheduled therapy was delivered in most instances. 26 The low 'failure-to-attend' rate for individual sessions provides confirmatory evidence of the acceptability of the program. On balance, the model is acceptable and accessible in the context of limited service availability and socio-economic disadvantage.…”

“…26 Another positive feature of the service model was the integration of the student-led service with existing local allied health services for ongoing care of children referred with complex needs. The service was effective at identifying children with mild and moderate delays as well as finding the smaller number of severe complex cases that were referred (if not already in their care) to hospital services.…”

Rural and remote speech-language pathology service inequities: An Australian human rights dilemma

“…Meaningful engagement with rural and remote communities in addressing complex childhood communication delays and SLP service inequities can promote the alignment of service to community needs and contexts and the development of acceptable and sustainable healthcare (Aragon & Garcia, 2015;Jones et al, 2016a). However, designing civically engaged and responsive SLP strategies can be complex.…”

“…These people live in towns, communities and isolated locations that can experience limited access to healthcare services, including allied health services such as speech-language pathology (SLP) (Spiers & Harris, 2015). Contextual and service access factors such as; geographical isolation, lower socio-economic status of populations and health workforce shortages, can contribute to systems failures to respond to civic calls for early engagement to address childhood developmental delays (Jones, McAllister, & Lyle, 2016a).…”

Value-adding to health professional student placement experiences: Enhancing work readiness and employability through a rural community engagement program

“…Inherent within the different definitions, theories and applications however, is agreement that there are a number of student benefits for personal and academic growth (Deeley, 2014;Hébert & Hauf, 2015), collaborative practice (Croker, Brown, Little, & Crowley, 2016) and transformative learning (Caspersz & Olaru, 2017;Prout, Lin, Nattabi, & Green, 2014). Community benefits are less articulated and include co-produced outcomes where partnerships are initiated by communities to address areas of need (Jones, McAllister, & Lyle, 2016a).…”