Virtual professional networks between speech pathologists
Magnús S. Magnússon · 1998
All speech pathologists in one Swedish county will develop methods for supervision, therapy and development of professional methods, using ISDN-based videotelephony and Internet. The project is the first one of its kind and has initiated follow-up projects. It is primarily based upon research developed at the University of Karlstad, the Department of Disability and Language. 1. BACKGROUND Speech Pathology is a fairly young discipline. The medical area of phoniatrics has existed for one hundred years but the professional group of speech therapists with its different subgroups has existed for a few decades, at least based upon formal and general education. Today, most countries have colleges for academical basic and further education for speech therapists. In Sweden there are four Universities which have four year courses for speech pathologists and also a master-course. It is also possible to go on to a PhDexam. There have also been colleges for special teachers, specializing into the field of speech pathology, However, these colleges have been postponed and at the moment there is only one professional basic education whereby you can become a speech therapist in Sweden. In the field of speech pathology there have existed several computer-based applications for therapeutical use since the late 1960’s. However, the field did not really start to develop until the beginning of the 1990’s when personal computers had started to be common tools at clinics, schools and hospitals. The development in Sweden has probably been a little more rapid since several speech pathologists started to develop language training software, mainly for Aphasia therapy already in the early 1980’s. Especially one program called Lexia and its earlier version Afasi very rapidly became a household word for Swedish speech therapists (Gunnilstam, 1989). By 1990, most speech therapists in Sweden had access to that program in their daily work. There were also special 5-week courses available concentrating on computer usage for speech pathologists from the college in Stockholm, By 1996 about one hundred out of the 800 of Sweden’s speech pathologists had passed that course and about 10 of the Speech pathologists had established themselves as part-time programmers. However, most of the applications were directed towards use in the individual clinic, in the everyday use with patients or clients and not over a distance. Telematical applications were very rare among the speech therapists. A few professionals tried the text-telephone and even fewer tried out electronic BBS:s in the late 80’s and the early 90’s. There were a few pioneering activities in Norway, Sweden and the US. For instance, the journal CUSH (Computer Users among Speech and Hearing Therapists) was published in the US for almost 10 years and included many articles on computer applications in that field and a few articles on telematics as well. The earliest mention of telematical networking for professionals was published already in 1985 (Blache, 1985). Probably due to the relatively high cost of long-distance calls in the US, usage of BBS:es and fax and that sort of technology was a local thing for a relatively long time and no real results of investigations were published until the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s when a few practicians published reports almost simultaneously at the ASHA-conferences or in CUSH. Most of these presentations introduced special national BBS-systems as especially suited for professional exchange (Bull, Cochran, 1987/a, 1987/b, 1988/a-c; Dean, Pickering Jr, 1989, 1991; Krupke, 1990; Bull, La Pine, 1990). A few years later in the US a few papers on the possibilities to make diagnostics (and therapy) using telematics were published (Wertz, 1992; Wertz & al, 1992).Most of their suggestions were based on assumptions and not so much on real work. The real breakthrough in the US came when the Internet was established and quite suddenly a lot of sites have been established, concerning speech pathology, including courseware and professional information (Goldberg, 1997).