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JCPSLP Volume 19, Number 2 2017 73
The clients
The clients offered the Saturday clinic were either current
therapy clients who had difficulty attending during the week
due to work/school commitments, or were the next clients
on the waiting list. Families were offered weekly
appointment slots for the duration of the Saturday clinic.
Children could not attend the Saturday clinic and the
weekday clinic at the same time.
Twenty-eight children were offered review and/or therapy
appointments on Saturdays, and 20 were able to attend.
Eighty-eight sessions were scheduled, with 12 cancelled
appointments. Four of these cancelled appointments were
missed on a long weekend. Five appointments were
cancelled due to illness and were unable to be rescheduled
at short notice due to the limited timeframe and availability
of the Saturday clinic. Seven of the 20 children were
discharged following review and/or therapy. Where children
were discharged prior to the completion of the Saturday
service, the timeslots were reallocated to additional children
who needed to complete a standardised assessment, or
who would continue therapy following the conclusion of
Saturday sessions. These details are summarised in Table 2.
in the literature but are known to be prevalent, and were
considered in the set up of the Saturday clinic to be
described.
Although the literature review did not yield evidence
regarding paediatric community health services running
on a weekend, it did highlight themes regarding the
importance of offering appointments at times that are
suitable for families to attend, and the potential benefits
of implementing a Saturday service within an allied health
setting.
Service background
The SLP department discussed in this article offers
paediatric outpatient services 8.30am – 5pm, Monday to
Friday. Assessment and therapy is offered for speech,
language, fluency, voice and paediatric feeding, and clients
are generally between 3 and 8 years old. Children eligible
for early intervention or alternative public funding are
referred to other services. Intake appointments are offered
to establish if children are eligible for other services, and to
provide parents with some strategies to use while waiting
for therapy. Waiting times for therapy range from 8 months
to 15 months from referral. Therapy is usually offered on an
individual basis, with groups run at times to manage the
waiting list. There is a strong focus on home practice, with
families encouraged to take responsibility for booking their
next appointment when they have completed home
practice.
In response to growing demands on local paediatric
SLP services, the SLP department was contracted by
Western Medicare Local (WML), NSW to provide additional
services to the community. This contract for $8000
was to enhance access to paediatric SLP services by
providing additional staffing and clinic time/availability.
Due to the above-mentioned difficulties for families to
attend appointments during usual business hours, it was
decided to extend the available appointment times to cater
to family commitments. Offering appointments after 5pm
on weekdays was considered; however, this would not
have greatly increased the number of additional therapy
appointments available. It was also felt that children and
families would find later appointments such as 6pm and
7pm difficult for concentration, attendance, and subsequent
therapy gains.
Western Medicare Local provides an after-hours medical/
GP service which includes a Saturday service, and private
SLP providers do offer Saturday appointments. As such, a
Saturday service option for paediatric SLP was developed
within the team, in consultation with department managers,
WML, and families.
Implementation
The service
The Saturday clinic service was run for two months by three
speech-language pathologists who were employed
full-time, but volunteered to work the Saturdays as paid
overtime. Each clinician worked between five and seven
Saturdays in total, and offered from three to seven hours
per Saturday shift. Consideration was given to prior
weekend commitments and some weekends a clinician
was not available. One clinician was only available for a
maximum of three hours per Saturday. The clinics did not
start until after 10am. In total, 94 hours of service were
provided by the three clinicians over two months. These
hours are summarised in Table 1.
Table 1. Hours provided by week and by SLP
SLP 1 SLP 2 SLP 3
Week 1 6 hours 6 hours nil
Week 2 6 hours 6 hours nil
Week 3 6 hours nil 3 hours
Week 4 6 hours 6 hours 3 hours
Week 5 6 hours 7 hours 3 hours
Week 6 6 hours 7 hours 3 hours
Week 7 nil 6 hours 2 hours
Week 8 6 hours nil nil
Total hours/SLP 42 hours 38 hours 14 hours
Table 2. Saturday paediatric SLP service summary
Number of children offered review/therapy appointments on
a Saturday:
28
Number able to attend: 20
Occasions of service (OOS) offered: 88
Cancelled appointments (Unable to attend/Failed to attend): 12
Number of children discharged: 7
Evaluation
Parent feedback questionnaires were issued at the conclusion
of the Saturday clinic, and included a range of custom-
designed questions focusing on parent satisfaction with
service accessibility, therapy outcomes, and likelihood of
attending additional Saturday clinic sessions should the
opportunity arise. The results of the questionnaire, in addition
to verbal feedback received, indicated that parents were
very appreciative of the opportunity to attend Saturday
therapy sessions.
Many parents expressed an interest in continuing
the Saturdays should this be a possibility in the future.