ACQ Vol 12 No 3 2010

Accessible healthcare

From the editors Nicole Watts Pappas and Marleen Westerveld

Contents

105 From the editors 106 Communication accessibility in healthcare settings – Robyn O’Halloran 108 Creating a communicative environment in hospital for adults with developmental disability and complex communication needs – Bronwyn Hemsley, Susan Balandin, and Leanne Togher 112 Improving communication access across Austin Health – Kathryn McKinley, Shauna Poole, and Melanie White 116 Creating communicative access in Barwon Health: Dwelling in possibility – Natalie Anderson 120 Clinical insights: Reflections on improving hospital access for people who are Deaf or have a hearing impairment – Evelyn Towers 123 What’s the evidence? Communicatively accessible healthcare environments – Robyn O’Halloran and Tanya Rose 127 Communicatively accessible healthcare environments: Ethics and informed consent – Deborah Hersh and Melanie Breese talk to Suze Leitão 129 Research Update: Webcam Lidcombe Program treatment – Kylie Farnsworth 131 Webwords 38: Universal design – Caroline Bowen 134 Quality assurance: A private practice perspective – Katherine Osborne 140 Clinical insights: Implementing effective stuttering therapy within a school – Malathi Ferdinando and Luana Stone 144 Speech language hearing services in Japan – Jun Katsuki-Nakamura and Junichi Fukaura 148 Our top 10 resources for creating communicatively accessible healthcare settings – Kathryn McKinley, Shauna Poole, and Melanie White

Nicole Watts Pappas (left) and Marleen Westerveld

Welcome to the final edition of ACQuiring Knowledge in Speech, Language and Hearing for 2010. The articles in this issue highlight the important, but perhaps neglected topic of the accessibility of healthcare for people with communication impairment. We thank Dr Robyn O’Halloran for soliciting a number of excellent articles for this issue and for suggesting the topic to us. O’Halloran introduces the issue with an overview of the need for speech pathologists to advocate for accessible healthcare environments in their workplaces. Following are a number of peer-reviewed and “Clinical Insights” papers on a range of related topics. These papers cover both the findings from the literature in accessible healthcare as well as the clinical implications of those findings. Hemsley, Balandin, and Togher review the literature investigating communicative environments in hospital for adults with developmental disability and Towers discusses improving hospital access for people with hearing impairment. Highlighting practical ways to improve the accessibility of healthcare services, McKinley, Poole, and White report on the outcomes of several quality improvement projects focused on improving access in their hospital for people with communication impairment. In a similar vein, Anderson describes the formation and work of the “Communicative Access Care Improvement Group” at Austin Hospital. Many of our regular columns such as “Top 10 resources”, “What’s the evidence?” and “Around the journals” also focus on the topic of accessible healthcare. In other articles in this issue, Ferdinando and Stone discuss the challenges of implementing stuttering therapy within a school setting and Osborne describes the process of conducting a parent satisfaction survey in a private clinic. Our fascinating Asia Pacific column in this issue describes speech pathology practice in Japan. On a personal note, this will be our last issue as co-editors. While Marleen is continuing in her role as co-editor, Nicole has decided to finish her editorship with this issue. We have very much enjoyed working together on ACQ for the last two years and hope that it has provided evidence based, and clinically useful articles that have inspired our readers to reflect on their practice and perhaps even to publish in ACQ ! We come to our last issue with some sadness but are excited to welcome Kerry Ttofari Eecen as the new co-editor of ACQ for 2011–2012.

150 Around the journals 153 Resources reviews

105

ACQ Volume 12, Number 2 2010

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