ARCHIEVE

Examination of Speech and Language Therapists' Views on Teletherapy Practices and Their Readiness for Change

Nurcan Alpüran Kocabıyık Hüseyin Demirci
Abstract

Purpose: Tele-therapy is a service which speech and language therapists make assessments, counseling, and therapy with their clients across the tele- conference systems. Becoming ready for change describes not only the organizational commitment (intentions), beliefs and attitudes of the members of the organization towards the implementation and necessity of the change, but it also describes the capacity of the organization to achieve the change. This study aims to reveal the opinions of speech and language therapists about teletherapy practices and to determine their level of readiness for change. Method: 87 speech and language therapists participated in this descriptive research. The data collection tool was a questionnaire that was prepared for speech and language tele-therapy practices. All the questions in the questionnaire which was consisted of 9 items were revised by two experienced speech and language therapists and “readiness for change scale which consisted of 12 items were used. This scale determines the level of readiness for change, and at the same time, it provides an opportunity to evaluate readiness for change in the commitment (intentional) dimension, readiness for change in the cognitive dimension, and readiness for change in the emotional dimension. Reliability coefficients of the commitment (intention), cognitive and emotional dimensions were 0.90, 0.87 and 0.75, respectively. The data was obtained were analyzed through the SPSS 20 package program. Results: It was found that fluency disorders which was the most preferable field and 13-25 was the most preferable age group for teletherapy practices in speech and language therapy. The results also showed that while the biggest advantage of teletherapy was its being accessible, its biggest disadvantage was to experience online connection problems. In teletherapy practices, it has been stated that the efficiency of the teletherapy can change according to the characteristics of speech and language disorders. İn general speech and language therapists seem to have high levels of readiness for change. When the 3 sub-dimensions of readiness for change were examined, it was seen that speech and language therapists were ready for a high level of cognitive and emotional dimension and moderate level of commitment (intent) dimension. When the sub-dimensions of readiness for change were compared with each other, it was found that speech and language therapists were mostly ready for change in the emotion dimension. There was a significant difference between emotional readiness for change and commitment readiness for change. Conclusion: It was seen that the majority of speech and language therapists want to use teletherapy practices in their sessions and they seem to be ready for this. The high level of readiness for change on the part of speech and language therapists indicates that they are not resistant to change. They are open to innovation and learning new pedagogic techniques for change and they intent to use teletherapy practices in their practice.

Keywords

speech and language therapy, readiness for change, tele-practice, tele-therapy, telerehabilitation

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