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Table 1 Facilitators and barriers to telepractice implementation

From: The process of telepractice implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a narrative inquiry of preschool speech-language pathologists and assistants from one center in Canada

 

Themes

Quotes

Facilitators

Team approach to implementation

“Support from everyone working as a team was huge. I think that you can’t transition to this [telepractice] without having a team of people. Because everybody could fill in a spot that needed to be filled, a knowledge area that needed to be filled. And, there are people that wanted to take a leadership role and then everybody could fill in those spots from there, and it was very useful.” (SLP001)

“There were so many hands in the pot at the beginning, nobody knew what to do first, you know, like and so that caused lots of stress. Having to even learn how to schedule a Zoom meeting, for some of us, causes lots of stress. But, knowing that there’s other people that are going through the same stress helped us.” (SLP011)

Resource sharing

“I was the head of the Materials Committee, so I took it upon myself to start researching and finding [therapy materials] … So myself and three other staff members really dug in there and spent a lot of time learning how to create our own materials so that we could support the staff in that regard. Now we have over 100 games and over 100 books that we’ve created and use regularly.” (SLP007)

Barriers

Lack of technology support

“We don’t have a designated IT person. And when we first started, we had all kinds of computer issues we didn’t even have the ability to work” (SLP011).

“And the other thing is that it’s [troubleshooting technology is] taking away from my clinical time, and away from my colleagues’ clinical time. We spent hours doing that kind of thing, which means that I’m getting behind on report writing, and I can’t see as many clients now because I’m doing all this stuff, trying to figure out how to use the technology. But you know if we had proper IT support within our agency, then we could call the IT department and they could access our computer remotely and show us and help us through it immediately.” (SLP004)

Facilitator for some clinicians and barriers for others

Varying degrees of clinicians’ readiness

“Let me figure out a way to do this, so I keep my job, that motivated me in a lot of ways, and I tend to want to jump right in.” (SLP003)

“At first, I was kind of hopeful we’d just go back and person, so I guess that’s my initial thoughts, I just really wanted to go back [to in person services]. And then when it started to be more real than teletherapy was going to be a thing, I just had to get my head in the game and then came to terms with it and started doing a lot of like online professional learning to learn more about Telepractice.” (SLP005)