Telepractice Evaluations With Children Who Are Deaf/Hard of Hearing: A Clinical Approach for Early Intervention Speech-Language Pathologists

Abstract

Purpose: With the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who specialize in working with children who are deaf/hard of hearing continued to provide diagnostic services to the birth-to-3 population. Families' needs for this type of service did not stop while “safer at home” orders were in place. In March 2020, the nation was shut down, and in-person services came to a screeching halt. The purpose of this clinical focus article is to outline the procedures adapted by our clinical team, which allowed our SLPs to continue to meet the needs of families when in-person services were not available. The value in these adaptations was meaningful and continues to aid our ability to better serve families who may not be candidates to physically attend clinical appointments. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged clinicians to adapt initial evaluation services and led to many questions that needed to be answered to continue serving children with a newly diagnosed hearing loss. Several strategies for providing services to families during the early intervention years via telepractice will be discussed. The clinical approach to decision making and methods utilized by our providers and graduate student clinicians, including the virtual meeting platform, correspondence and preparation with the family, assessment protocols, clinical recommendations, and parent guidance/counseling resources, will be outlined. Conclusions: The success observed using this clinical approach to initial evaluations and telepractice is notable. This clinical note is an effort to distribute the process to other SLPs and is considered necessary. The successful adaptations implemented have allowed clinic provision for our birth-to-3 population to thrive. Despite several identified barriers, telepractice will continue to evolve and be a vital service delivery model in the future. This article describes the overall processes implemented for SLP diagnostics using the telepractice service delivery model.