The perspectives of speech–language pathologists: Providing teletherapy to patients with speech, language and swallowing difficulties during a COVID-19 context

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

 
 
Field Value
 
Title The perspectives of speech–language pathologists: Providing teletherapy to patients with speech, language and swallowing difficulties during a COVID-19 context
 
Creator Tar-Mahomed, Zahraa Kater, Kelly-Ann
 
Subject — teletherapy; stroke; communication disorders; swallowing disorders; speech therapy; speech–language pathologist (SLP); stroke intervention
Description Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a huge impact on every facet of life. This directly included the delivery of health care from allied health professionals such as speech–language pathologists (SLPs) in South Africa. Research has shown that there is limited research done locally on the impact of COVID-19 relating to stroke care. Consequently, this results in a lack of research on the provision of speech, language and swallowing intervention using teletherapy after a stroke from an SLP point of view.Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of SLPs with regard to their use of teletherapy in a COVID-19 context when providing speech, language and swallowing intervention for patients after a stroke.Methods: This study made use of a qualitative approach. An electronic questionnaire was sent to SLPs inviting them to participate in the study. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants and thematic content analysis was used to analyse the open-ended qualitative questions.Results: The findings show that SLPs experienced a variety of facilitators and barriers to using teletherapy. Additionally, issues of access differ across the private and public sector SLPs for both the clients and the SLPs.Conclusion: The current study provided research in the field of teletherapy, which is relatively new in the South African context. The study, whilst small in scale, provided some insight into the changes experienced from the shift to teletherapy.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2022-08-11
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajcd.v69i2.902
 
Source South African Journal of Communication Disorders; Vol 69, No 2 (2022); 7 pages 2225-4765 0379-8046
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajcd.org.za/index.php/sajcd/article/view/902/1789 https://sajcd.org.za/index.php/sajcd/article/view/902/1790 https://sajcd.org.za/index.php/sajcd/article/view/902/1791 https://sajcd.org.za/index.php/sajcd/article/view/902/1792
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2022 Zahraa Tar-Mahomed, Kelly-Ann Kater https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ADVERTISEMENT