New graduates’ perceptions of preparedness to provide speech-language therapy services in general and dysphagia services in particular

Abstract

BackgroundUpon graduation, newly qualified speech-language therapists are expected to provide services independently. This study describes new graduates’ perceptions of their preparedness to provide services across the scope of the profession and explores associations between perceptions of dysphagia theory and clinical learning curricula with preparedness for adult and paediatric dysphagia service delivery.MethodsNew graduates of six South African universities were recruited to participate in a survey by completing an electronic questionnaire exploring their perceptions of the dysphagia curricula and their preparedness to practise across the scope of the profession of speech-language therapy.ResultsEighty graduates participated in the study yielding a response rate of 63.49%. Participants perceived themselves to be well prepared in some areas (e.g. child language: 100%; articulation and phonology: 97.26%), but less prepared in other areas (e.g. adult dysphagia: 50.70%; paediatric dysarthria: 46.58%; paediatric dysphagia: 38.36%) and most unprepared to provide services requiring sign language (23.61%) and African languages (20.55%). There was a significant relationship between perceptions of adequate theory and clinical learning opportunities with assessment and management of dysphagia and perceptions of preparedness to provide dysphagia services.ConclusionThere is a need for review of existing curricula and consideration of developing a standard speech-language therapy curriculum across universities, particularly in service provision to a multilingual population, and in both the theory and clinical learning of the assessment and management of adult and paediatric dysphagia, to better equip graduates for practice.

Poor consistency in evaluating South African adults with neurogenic dysphagia

“…A high rate of variability in clinical practice is expected in an economically developing country like South Africa where different education and training programmes are established at different universities. Singh et al ( 2015 ) discovered that not only were these education and training programmes varied, but four out of six universities provided inadequate theoretical and clinical training. This leaves half of speech-language therapists feeling unprepared and insufficiently trained in adult dysphagia to perform a clinical swallow evaluation without supervision in the working world (Singh et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Singh et al ( 2015 ) discovered that not only were these education and training programmes varied, but four out of six universities provided inadequate theoretical and clinical training. This leaves half of speech-language therapists feeling unprepared and insufficiently trained in adult dysphagia to perform a clinical swallow evaluation without supervision in the working world (Singh et al, 2015 ). New speech-language therapists may omit assessing some clinical components in the clinical swallow evaluation due to nervousness or due to lack of theoretical knowledge, training and experience (Singh et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Any poor adherence to existing practice guidelines and clinical component utilisation may contribute towards motivating for uniform curricula. By providing uniform curricula, the quality of training is thought to improve, or at least generalise better clinical practice by increasing levels of preparedness for evaluating dysphagia (Singh et al, 2015 ).…”

Scarce Health Human Resource Wastage: No work for South African Audiologists? A descriptive Survey Study.

“…The current study's main findings indicate that 16% of audiologists are unemployed in their first-year post graduation and this increases to 19% in the second-year post-graduation. An unemployment rate between 16%-19% is very high in context of the estimated total annual number of audiology graduates from the six institutions that offer the audiology program in South Africa, which is approximately between 100 to 150 graduates [24][25][26] .…”

“…First training programs were introduced around 1937 as two-year diplomas and evolved to four-year degree programs by 1948 [24] . To date, audiology training as a singular, autonomous profession is available at some of the six higher education institutions offering the degree in South Africa with approximately 100-150 new graduates recorded annually [24][25][26] . It is worth noting that this is a low number of audiologists entering into healthcare system to meet the high need of hearing health services as influenced by the disease and disability burden, in South Africa [27] .…”