Speak Out OCTOBER 2019 V3 DIGITAL EDITION

Association news

Speech Pathology Australia 70 years young - a focus on the last decade

“To say we live in changing times is something of a cliché. However, it is truer now than ever before in the (then 60 year) history of our profession in Australia. From the policy and funding environment, to emerging technologies and techniques, the regulatory context and workforce demographics. Everything is changing and it is changing at an unprecedented pace.” Chris Stone, National President Report, Speak Out, August 2011

There are few certainties in life, but change is one of them. And in the past ten years the pace of change has been unrelenting. Speech Pathology Australia, as the peak body for the speech pathology profession in Australia, has not been immune.

space in Bank Place, still owned by the Association, is now rented out to commercial tenants, providing a source of income for the organisation. While the profession has grown exponentially in the last ten years, what does the profession look like? Late in 2014, Health Workforce Australia (now subsumed within the Federal Department of Health) produced a publication “Speech Pathologists in Focus”, that brought together all the available data at the time about the speech pathology workforce. It found that a “typical” Australian speech pathologist was female, working part-time (about four days a week), in her late 30s, Bachelor’s Degree educated, living and working in a major city area, Australian born, and working in private practice. International As the Association has grown over the last decade it has endeavoured to spread its wings and influence beyond Australia. In 2013, along with representatives from American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA), New Zealand Speech-Language Therapists’ Association (NZSTA), Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT), Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists (IASLT), and Speech-Language and

In February 2010, 3250 speech pathologists were proud to be members of Speech Pathology Australia (the Association). Now, 10 years on, that number has soared to 9,302 (September 2019).The 10,000 member hurdle beckons. Not bad for a fledgling profession born in the 1930s

pioneered by Elinor Wray. For more than 18 years the Association’s national office

was at Bank Place in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD. However, in May 2015, bursting at the seams, the Association moved its operations 200 metres up the road to a new, leased professional office at 114 William Street. The office

Pioneer of the profession, Elinor Wray.

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October 2019 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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