ACQ Vol 12 no 1 2010

Currently, I am vice dean in the Faculty of Special Education and train students who will be teachers at special and inclusive schools and children’s hospitals. I teach courses in audiology, language development for children with HI, early intervention and inclusive education for CwDs, and how to educate children with language difficulties. In addition, I have been directly supporting children with language difficulties and consulting with parents. I am interested in working with children with HI and children who stutter. I would love speech-language therapists in foreign countries, especially Australia, to share the Lidcombe Programme with us. I have studied its theoretical framework but have not yet been trained to implement it. It is crucial for Viet Nam to develop formal training courses for teachers to teach them how to help develop language for the children they work with, and for doctors and nurses who work with people with communication impairments. We also need to develop research programs in communication development and impairments in Viet Nam. Nguy ~ên Thi. Ngo. c Dung Director, ENT Hospital, HCMC President of Vietnamese ORL Society Professor and Chairperson, ENT Department, Medicine and Pharmacy University, HCMC Vice Chairperson, ENT Department, Municipal Medical University Pham Ngoc Thach, HCMC I am director of the ENT Hospital in HCMC, responsible for ENT patients in the south of Viet Nam as well as HCMC. Our hospital also has a role in teaching medical students and postgraduate doctors who study to become ENT specialists. I am also the professor and chairperson of the ENT Department at the Medicine and Pharmacy University and vice chairperson of the ENT Department of the Municipal Medical University Pham Ngoc Thach, both in HCMC. In addition, I have served as president of the National Vietnamese Otolaryngological Society since 2004. I spent 1992 in Lyon, France as an ENT intern in the Hospital Edouard Herriott. Where I worked had an audio- phonology department which trained speech therapists, so in the afternoons, after finishing my work as an ENT doctor, I followed the speech therapists to learn how to work with their patients. I have continued to read and study about speech therapy since then. When I came back to the ENT Hospital in HCMC, I trained three nurses to work with the patients, using knowledge from French textbooks and what I had learned from the speech therapists in France. I have asked visiting doctors from France, Belgium, and the Philippines who are specialised in speech or voice rehabilitation to organise short courses and train our speech therapists. The speech therapists also develop their own learning through practice and readings. At the ENT Hospital, we see many patients who need speech therapy and we cannot treat all of them due to the lack of knowledge and lack of staff. We need a formal speech therapy course. Fortunately I have met people in Project Boomerang and the Trinh Foundation Australia – Dr Aziz Khan, Mrs Sue Woodward, and later Professor Lindy McAllister. They have worked with me to develop a 6-week short course in speech therapy (described earlier in this article). There is a growing demand in Viet Nam for speech therapy services. Currently, speech therapy is offered by doctors, physiotherapists, nurses and some technicians who have undertaken short courses in speech therapy, offered by visiting speech therapists from Australia, USA, France and the UK. So, for the whole country, we need

academic training of professional speech therapists with a 4-year baccalaureate degree or a 2-year postgraduate degree. With the help of Australian speech therapists via the Trinh Foundation Australia and Project Boomerang, we will set up the beginnings of a long-term training program and the graduate speech therapists will continue our mission of training, and help improve the quality of life of our patients. A Memorandum of Understanding with Pham Ngoc Thach (Municipal) Medical University was signed on 13 October 2009 to commence a full-time, 2-year postgraduate diploma in speech therapy in late 2010. The university will need considerable support from volunteer Australian speech therapists to provide a high quality course until their graduates can be trained to take over running of the course. Summary A growing cadre of partially trained and fully qualified speech therapists in Viet Nam, together with a demand for speech therapy services in public and private facilities points to a future of developing and sustaining a speech therapy service and profession in Viet Nam. The Australian and Vietnamese speech therapists who have co-written this article are actively working together with their respective hospitals, universities and governments to create a sustainable university-based degree in speech therapy, based initially in HCMC. Development of the curriculum and academic governance processes for the program is well underway, with the vital support of the ENT Hospital of HCMC and The Trinh Foundation Australia. Achievement of this goal will require support from Australian speech therapists to help resource the program and provide teaching of the first cohorts of students, and later for ongoing professional development for the new graduates. References Clarke, S., Roberts, A., White, J., & McAllister, L. (2002). Clinical placements in Vietnam: Students’ stories of their experiences of developing intercultural competence . Paper presented at the annual conference of Speech Pathology Australia, Melbourne, May 2002. Landis, P., & Pham, T. T. C. (1975). Articulation pattern and speech intelligibility of 54 Vietnamese children with unoperated oral clefts: Clinical observations and impressions. Cleft Palate Journal , 12 (2), 234–245. McAllister, L., Whiteford, G., Hill, R., & Thomas, N. (2006). Learning and reflection in professional inter-cultural experience: Qualitative study. Journal of Reflective Practice , 7 (3), 367–381. McAllister, L. & Whiteford, G. (2008). Facilitating clinical decision making in students in intercultural fieldwork placements. In J. Higgs, M. Jones, S. Loftus, & N. Christensen (Eds.), Clinical reasoning in the health professions . (3rd ed.) (pp. 357–365). Sydney: Elsevier. Whiteford, G. & McAllister, L. (2006). Politics and complexity in intercultural fieldwork: The Vietnam experience. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal , Supp 1, 54 , S74–83. Zbar, R. I. S., Rai, S.M., & Dingman D.L., (2000). Establishing cleft malformation surgery in developing nations: A model for the new millennium. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery , 106 (4), 886–891.

Correspondence to: Lindy McAllister, PhD Deputy Head, School of Medicine University of Queensland Herston Rd, Herston, Qld 4006 phone: +617 3346 5275 email: Lindy.McAllister@uq.edu.au

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ACQ Volume 12, Number 1 2010

www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au