How to Educate Colleagues about the SLP Scope of Practice through your Position on the Hiring Commit
It's no secret within the field that many people outside of the field have no idea what we do. SLPs have gotten used to explaining and re-explaining our scope to the general public, but this lack of awareness can pose a systemic issue when it befalls administrators who are tasked with hiring SLPs.
I've read countless accounts of job postings for "Speech Teachers" and pay scale positions indicative of this misconception. Recently, in the Purposeful Rebranding of Speech-Language Pathology (PRSLP) Facebook group, an SLP posed a question-based solution.
If a Speech-Language Pathologist is serving on the hiring committee that is seeking an additional SLP, how can we pose questions to the interviewee that not only help us select the best candidate, but also help the rest of the committee see the breadth and depth of our field?
Here were my suggestions for what we could ask a candidate for a pediatric SLP position in full view of our non-SLP colleagues to slyly showcase that we are a healthcare profession that works on more than just "speech" disorders:
How about: what aspects of your medical internship do you believe will be most useful to you in working with this population?
How would you educate parents and teachers on the differences between speech and language and the complexities of each?
What would you say to a parent to help them understand the difference between an articulation disorder and apraxia of speech?
Have you ever worked with a child with an acquired language impairment secondary to a traumatic brain injury or seizure disorder.
Can you describe some your strategies for working with those populations (acquired language disorders secondary to brain injury) and how they differ from your strategies in working with developmental language disorders.
What steps would you take if you see signs and symptoms within speech and language that are characteristic of a more global neurological or medical problem that has not yet been diagnosed.
How would you handle seeing signs or being notified of signs of dysphagia/swallowing disorders in this pediatric population?
How would you work collectively with an outpatient SLP with whom you share a case?
What other questions would you ask an SLP interviewee to serve the dual purpose of finding the right person for the job and taking advantage of this opportunity to continue educating and reinforcing our co-workers knowledge of the speech-language pathology scope of practice?
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