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Australian speech pathologists: 13 things you should know about health care complaints and the Health Care Complaints Commission

29 June 2019 By David Kinnane Leave a Comment

As healthcare workers, we share the responsibility to ensure we are delivering health services in a professional, safe, and ethical manner. This week, we attended a very practical workshop hosted by Tony Kofkin and his colleagues from the Health Care Complaints Commission NSW (the ‘Commission’) to better understand the role of the Commission and its complaints management process. 

Here are our 13 key takeaways for speech pathologists:

  1. Speech pathologists in Australia are “Unregistered Health Practitioners”, because we are not currently required to be registered under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law. You can read more about this here.
  2. Speech pathologists in Australia are self-regulated. For example, members of Speech Pathology Australia are bound contractually by the Code of Ethics, and Certified Practising Speech Pathologists are also bound by professional self-regulation professional development and other obligations.
  3. Self-regulation doesn’t mean Australian speech pathologists are completely unregulated, however. Speech pathologists in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, are subject to “negative licensing” under statutory Codes of Conduct. In NSW, for example, speech pathologists must display and are bound by the Code of Conduct for Unregistered Health Practitioners. This Code of Conduct is set out in Schedule 3 of the NSW Public Health Regulation 2012. A National Code – which is very similar to the NSW Code – has been implemented in South Australia, Queensland, and Victoria, and is being implemented across the other States. 
  4. Sometimes, clients, families or others may wish to make a compliant about a speech pathologist. Most of the time, this is best managed directly with the speech pathologist in question. Speech Pathology Australia has a complaints system, including an Ethics Board to investigate alleged breaches of the Code of Ethics. However, people can also make complaints about speech pathologists to the Health Care Complaints Commission (or its equivalents in other States). This is not very common, with the most serious complaints being lodged with Speech Pathology Australia and investigated by the Ethics Board.   
  5. The Commission is independent of Government (including the Minister for Health) and is obliged to investigate every written complaint it receives, although protecting public health and safety is its paramount consideration.
  6. The Code of Conduct outlines minimum standards for safe and ethical practice, and includes clauses about:
  • the need to have a clinical basis for treatment;
  • competence;
  • informed consent;
  • infection control;
  • improper relationships;
  • not making claims to cure serious illnesses;
  • working when impaired (e.g. by mental or physical illness or when under the effects of drugs and alcohol);
  • professional indemnity and other insurance requirements;
  • record keeping/progress notes; 
  • first aid;
  • privacy; and
  • displaying the Code.
The Code of Conduct for Unregistered Health Practitioners on display at our clinic.

7. Common complaint issues include:

  • professional conduct, including elder abuse and theft;
  • treatment, including treatment advice that causes significant harm; and
  • communication issues, including abruptness and refusal to answer questions.

8. If a complaint is received, the Commission generally seeks records from the speech pathologist. The Commission has coercive powers if you do not respond.

9. Investigations follow a two stage test: (1) Is there a breach of the Code of Conduct? and (2) is there a risk to public health and safety? The Commission can seek expert advice if needed.

10. The Commission has the power to make interim and final prohibition orders, preventing the speech pathologist from providing health services or imposing conditions (e.g. training, supervision) on the provision of health services. Reciprocal arrangements are in place with Queensland and South Australia (but not Victoria) to ensure that prohibition orders made in one of these states apply to the others. In practical terms, this means, as an example, a speech pathologist won’t be able to provide health services in Queensland if a prohibition order has been issued in NSW (and vice versa).

11. The Commission can also make public statements about health practitioners, and/or make comments to the speech pathologist to help the speech pathologist improve her or his practice.

12. If a speech pathologist in NSW is unhappy with the outcome, she or he can seek a review by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

13. The Health Care Complaints Commission publishes a Register of Orders on its website. You can access it here.

To access an A3 poster of the Code of Conduct to display at your clinic or business, see the Health Care Complaints Commission’s website here.

Related articles:

  • Australian speech pathologists: your client is receiving an unsafe treatment from an unregistered health practitioner. What should you do?
  • Dealing with negative online reviews: evidence-based strategies for speech pathologists
  • 5 steps I took to comply with Speech Pathology Australia’s advertising rules

Image: httpss://tinyurl.com/y59p35ph

Speech pathologists in private practice: do you know about these free resources?

9 June 2019 By David Kinnane Leave a Comment

As a profession, speech pathologists are generous to a fault. I’ve discovered that most speech pathologists (including very senior academics and over-worked clinicians) are delighted to share their knowledge with those of us in private practice. The key challenge is connecting the dots: carving out the time to find and filter the research, and to then apply it to our practices to improve client care.  

Some organisations and professionals are doing terrific work to make it easier for busy speech pathologists to find and translate research into practice. For example, The Informed SLP and many universities are now using social media and new technologies to help practitioners find out about their work. But we could all do more to help bridge the gap between research and day-to-day practice. 

To do our bit for knowledge sharing – and to help manage our fear of missing out on the joint Speech Pathology Australia-New Zealand Speech-Language Therapists’ Association (NZSPA) Conference in Brisbane last week – we spent each night of the conference going through the #NZSPAConf tweets to find resources, tools and tips that could help our practice and other private practices to improve client care. 

So here is our list, including:

  • 29 useful free resources we discovered (or rediscovered) from the NZSPA Conference tweets last week, with links to the actual tools and resources; and
  • 11 other ideas, including mental models, pending research, and other useful information to help clinicians in private practice. 

In most cases, the authors of the resources are clear from the links, although we’ve tried to add in twitter handles (or at least lead author names) where we could find them. Any errors of interpretation are ours alone.

Note that our selection bias was extreme: we chose things that were of immediate, practical, clinical interest to us in a busy private practice; and our interests are wide and eclectic! There were (literally) hundreds of other resources and tips on other topics that we could have shared from what was by any measure an amazing conference.

If you know of (or created!) other free evidence-based resources that would help private practitioners, please feel free to let us know, and we will add them to the list!

Tool/resourceLinksCredit/contact
The Squirrel Story (narrative Ax with Australian norms)httpss://www.languageandliteracyinyoungpeople.com/apps-resources

httpss://www.blacksheeppress.co.uk/product/squirrel-story-narrative-comprehension-assessment-nca/

httpss://www.blacksheeppress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/SquirrelNCA_IntActForm19feb.pdf
Suze Leitao @Suze_Freogirl, Emily Dawes @emilydawesSLP and team at
Black Sheep Press (UK)
Oral inferential comprehension intervention for children with #devlangdis (full free Rx resource)httpss://www.dropbox.com/sh/sh93neh6ql658xq/AADrIdNSms49Pr9el9D_51eda?dl=0
httpss://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265659018815736?journalCode=clta
Emily Dawes @emilydawesSLP, Suze Leitao @Suze_Freogirl and team
Health literacy and SLP Report Writing presentation (the slides themselves are a master class in Plain English, and clear expression)httpss://www.harmonyturnbull.org/2019/06/03/conference-presentation/Harmony Turnbull @SP_Harmony
PEERS for Young Adults program for social skills (free social communication videos)httpss://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138238718/videos.phpElizabeth Laugeson
Marleen Westerveld’s free resources, including discourse level narrative, retell tasks and a free photo bank you can use for a variety of receptive and expressive oral and written language taskshttpss://www.marleenwesterveld.com/resources/Marleen Westerveld 
@MWslp
A treasure trove of Phonological Awareness Resources (University of Canterbury)httpss://www.canterbury.ac.nz/education/research/phonological-awareness-resources/Gail Gillon @gailtgillon
Accessible information about speech, language and communicationhttpss://www.speakupsalford.nhs.uk/Via @speechiemsm
ERLI (comprising 120 typical first words and gestures, developed for young children in remote Northern Territory, but of potential use for many other populations, too)httpss://www.facebook.com/pg/EarlyRemoteLanguageInventory/photos/?ref=page_internalCaroline Jones and colleagues
PFASE (free e-course on paediatric feeding!)httpss://central.csds.qld.edu.au/central/courses/219Clinical Skills Development Service (Queensland)
OZI-SF (Australian MacArthur Bates vocabulary Ax) – watch this space!httpss://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0142723716648846?journalCode=flaaMarina Kalashnikova and colleagues
ReST (evidence-based CAS treatment)https://sydney.edu.au/health-sciences/rest/Tricia McCabe @tricmc and colleagues at the University of Sydney
TIDieR – Better Reporting of Interventions descriptions to allow better replication (checklist/guide)https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/tidier/Tammy Hoffmann and colleagues
Free – Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR)httpss://www.sugarlanguage.org/Bob Owens and Stacey Pavelko
Decoding Dragon to chase away the guessing monster (literacy)Lyn Stone @lifelonglit
Michigan 10 key skills for early literacy instructionhttpss://memspa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Booklet-FINAL-9.14.17.pdfVia @tricmc
Liberator AAC resources and informationhttpss://liberator.net.au/support/educationhttpss://liberator.net.au/
MOSAIC Online Ax for observations of people withintellectual disabilitieshttpss://www.mosaiccommunication.com.au/@AndySmidt
Intelligibility in Context Scalehttpss://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/ics@SharynneMcLeod
SoundLog Noise Dosimeterhttpss://itunes.apple.com/au/app/soundlog-noise-dosimeter/id1063941394?mt=8Australian Hearing Services
Ottawa Patient Decision Aid to support familieshttpss://decisionaid.ohri.ca/
Drooling Quotienthttpss://www.aacpdm.org/UserFiles/file/drooling-quotient-instructions.pdfvan Hulst and colleagues
Drooling Impact Scalehttpss://www.aacpdm.org/UserFiles/file/The-Drooling-Impact-Scale.pdfSusan Reid and colleagues
CSDRNetwork Transcription Guidelines (Guidelines Relating to Clinical Management of Child Speech Disorder | North Bristol NHS Trust)
Guidelines Relating to Clinical Management of Child Speech Disorder
Via @speechieellie
Promoting use of home languages:YouTube Resources from NSW Health SESLHDHow Childcare Educators can support bilingual children?:httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-7-KN4gFCc

Helping your child learn two languages: httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIrD7PkeDdg
Youth Voices in Youth Justicehttps://talkingtroublenz.org/presentations-publications/youth-voices-about-youth-justice/Talking Trouble NZ
Multilingual Language AxThe Alberta Language Development Questionnaire ALDeQ (Paradis) – questionnaires, intended to be administered in interview 

Non-word Repetition Task
Johanna Paradis


Dollaghan & Campbell
Multilingual Speech Axhttpss://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments@SharynneMcLeod
Office Lens (App) totake photos of whiteboards and presentations (free)httpss://itunes.apple.com/au/app/microsoft-office-lens-pdf-scan/id975925059?mt=8Via @robertPwells
Boys and literacy acquisitionhttpss://digitalmediaprojectforchildren.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/boys-and-literacy-acquisition-introduction/@ProfRvach

Other clinically relevant things I found out about from the NZSPA Conference tweets:

Topic/issue/modelMore about itResearch to watch/follow
New tongue tie research
Holly Salt, Sharon Smart @sharonsmart79, and Mary Claessen @SpeechMary
More about the duty of Care vs Dignity of Risk, including in the context of dysphagiahttpss://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6btzquVia @emilywaites
New drooling research on its way
Michelle McInerney
Linda Worrall’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Aphasia Therapists
Goal Setting model for aphasia (SMARTER): Shared, Monitored, Accessible, Relevant, Transparent, Evolving and Relationship-centred (Hersh et al., 2012)
@aphasiologist1

Watch out for soon to be published systematic study about Childhood Apraxia of Speech + evidence-based tips to help us to differentially diagnose Childhood Apraxia of Speech@LizMurraySpeakand colleagues via @speechiellie
Launch of the Centre of Research Excellence in Aphasia Recovery and Rehabilitationhttpss://www.latrobe.edu.au/research/centres/health/aphasia
More on the effects of classroom noise on language comprehension



@SamHarkus
Australian Hearing
Why classroom acoustics are an issue for SLPsRebecca Armstrong @bec_armstrong18
4 dimensions Maori health model (NZ)httpss://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/populations/maori-health/maori-health-models/maori-health-models-te-whare-tapa-wha
Better Scientific Posters design templateshttpss://osf.io/ef53g/
Excellent review/discussion  of the Simple View of Readinghttpss://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19404158.2019.1609272Kate Nation @ReadOxford

Image: httpss://tinyurl.com/y6953792

Speech pathologists in private practice: How to learn new skills rapidly

5 March 2019 By David Kinnane Leave a Comment

By nature and necessity, speech pathologists in private practice are life-long learners. Not only do we have to stay on top of research to keep our clinical skills up to date, we have to learn finance, marketing, technology, compliance, and other business skills, too.

Learning is essential to providing quality care to clients and for running our practices. But there are so many things to learn, and so little time. So what can we do to learn new skills rapidly?

Skills and knowledge are related, but different. Both are necessary to do professional work well

Professional work combines practical skills with special knowledge. They are not the same thing:

  • In law, I graduated with good academic knowledge of the laws of evidence, but then found myself as a new grad unable to make a simple filing because I didn’t have the skill to know how to draft the filing in a form that would be acceptable by the Court. I needed my supervisor to show me how to do it, using a template and modelling.
  • In the first semester of my speech pathology degree, I memorised head and neck anatomy, but then struggled to complete my first cranial nerve exam on a real, breathing person. It took me a good 15 tries before I could smoothly coordinate the practical motor requirements of the tests with my theoretical knowledge of the cranial nerves.

As a nerd, I’ve always found it easier to start with knowledge, and then learn the practical skill. Some of my colleagues do it the other way around: throwing themselves into practical tasks and then building the necessary professional knowledge around what they do.

Both ways can work. But good speech pathologists learn quickly that, in clinical practice, you need both skills and knowledge to do a good job.

Learning a new skill isn’t the same thing as improving an existing skill

Seems obvious, right? But we sometimes forget that you need to walk before you run. Many speech pathologists I know (including me!) sometimes forget that acquiring the basic skill requires a different approach to training an existing skill. Learning to walk is hard. Going from walking to jogging is less hard; and accelerating your jog into a run is easier again.

How to learn a new skills quickly?

Josh Kaufman, in his excellent “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast”, recommends 10 key principles of rapid learning. Here they are, paraphrased and ‘translated’ for speech pathology practice:

1. Choose a lovable project: Rapid skill acquisition is hard. It helps if you choose a skill that is important to you and your business – a skill that will make a difference, and ideally, that you will enjoy having. For example, early on, I decided to learn how to do evidence-based voice therapy for people with Parkinson’s Disease because I found the work very rewarding. I learned how to blog properly because I love sharing knowledge. I learned how to use video editing software (like Camtasia) to make training videos for my team because I was sick of spending my time saying the same thing over and over and wanted to save time. In each case, I had a compelling reason to do the work.

2. Work on one skill at a time: Focus! In our clinic skills improvement program, for example, we focused first on deepening our knowledge of language stimulation skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder before we kicked off a project to improve our diagnosis and treatment of childhood apraxia of speech. In business marketing, we decided first to learn the basics of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, then Instagram because my target audience was interacting on those platforms. I don’t worry too much about Snapchat at this stage. But, like Instagram, I might change my mind if it makes sense from a business perspective to do so.

3. Define your target performance level: To be good at my job, I don’t need to become a web or graphic designer, or produce award-winning documentaries. I need my work to be clear and useful. What does good enough look like to you? For new clinical skills, our base-line is competence. We won’t offer a service until we’re sure we can do it competently. In business marketing and advocacy, our base line is based on the usefulness of the information we present. Will a particular blog post give families enough evidence-based information to know what to do next or where to go for more information? This means we always proofread our work for readability, and cite our sources. It doesn’t mean that we aim for perfection. Trying to be perfect is a fool’s game, and can lead to procrastination and paralysis. 

4. Deconstruct skills into sub-skills. Most important skills can be broken into sub-skills. For example, when learning to do Cycles, we broke the program into sub-skills. We read a few of the leading peer-reviewed articles. We blogged about it (mainly to explain it in Plain English to ourselves). We broke the research down into chunks, like how to choose targets, how to do auditory bombardment, how to explain the program to parents, how to give clients feedback on attempts, how to use reinforcement and feedback, and how to ensure adequate dosage/repetitions in sessions. We then story-boarded a sample session and tried it out on each other in role-plays. We then developed resources (e.g. audio recordings and target word lists) to support efficient and consistent delivery across the practice. This approach works for business skills, too. For marketing with infographics, we first sat through a tutorial on how use the software properly (Canva), then worked out how to make a readable template, then practised summarising some of our more popular blog posts into single page bullet point lists, and finally mapped out how to get the work done on a schedule.

5. Obtain critical tools. It’s hard to practice a skill without the right equipment, and it’s easy to put things off because you don’t have the right tools. For example, in the clinic, you need evidence-based resources to assess and work on each of the Big 5 and oral language comprehension before you can practice literacy intervention. In business, having access to quality templates, procedures and management systems is essential when learning, for example, how to improve client satisfaction ratings and retention, or to reduce your failures to attend.

6. Eliminate barriers to practice. You need space, resources and time to practice new skills properly. Distractions (e.g. emails, phone calls, texts, Facebook) and emotional blocks (like fear, doubt, imposter syndrome, and embarrassment) can get in the way of learning new skills. In the clinic and in business, I block out times to work on new skills. I unplug my devices and force myself to persevere, despite my internal doubts.

7. Dedicate time to practice. You have 1,440 minutes a day to get things done. We all have work and family commitments. We all need leisure time, exercise, and sleep. But we all have time-wasting behaviours, too. I did a time audit and discovered mine were Netflix binges and reading the news on my phone. By reducing both, I found the time to learn new skills.

8. Get fast feedback. After learning about a new skill you think is important, don’t wait months to get your hands dirty. Try things out safely in the real world as soon as possible, and be prepared to make quick changes to improve your accuracy and skill level. For skills like book-keeping and social media posts, you might get instant feedback from your system or followers (sometimes a little confronting!). For new clinical skills, try to gets lots of immediate feedback on how you are doing when you are first practising the skill; then move to delayed and less frequent feedback as you master the basics and start training the skill. Experienced mentors can be a big help here. But, if you don’t have one to hand (and you should!), tools like biofeedback, or video and audio reviews of your performance can help you assess how you are doing – even if they are painful to sit through in the early days!

9. Practice in bursts, by the clock: When you’ve mastered a skill, time flies. But, during your first few attempts, time can drag. In the early stages, set a minimum block of time to work on the skill, e.g. 20 or 25 minutes. Once you start, keep going – even if it feels like you’ve been making mistake after mistake for hours. When I’m particularly hopeless at something (usually fine motor-related), I sometimes feel like the timer will never go off! Hang tough, even if you feel terrible about your poor performance and ‘urgently’ need to know all about the local footy scores or have a sudden urge to Marie Kondo your garage. Aim to distribute practice throughout the day when learning a tricky motor skill. Kaufman recommends practising new motor skills just before bedtime so that your brain can consolidate your learning during sleep. 

10. Go for massed practice and fast repetitions: you need sufficient quantity of practice and speed of trials. Once you’ve achieved acceptable ‘basic form’ in whatever skill you are learning, practice as much as you can, and as often. The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you will pick up the skill.

For motor skill acquisition (e.g. like touch typing or learning to use a new resource requiring manual dexterity), many of these principles will sound familiar to those of us trained in principles of motor learning.  

What about rapid learning of knowledge?

Aha! Good pick up and great question. Regular readers will note that some of Kaufman’s principles are consistent with evidence-based studying techniques, such as spaced practice, forced retrieval, and doing practice tests with the same structure as the real test.

This is one of my favourite subjects and an excellent topic for another day, don’t you think? (Watch this space!)

Bottom line

For speech pathologists in private practice, learning new skills is hard, but essential. When next preparing to learn a new skill, use the 10 principles above to practice it in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Principal source: Kaufman, J. (2013). The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast. London, England, Penguin Books.

Image: httpss://tinyurl.com/y2pnmxx9

8 mental models speech pathologists in private practice can use to make better business decisions

17 February 2019 By David Kinnane Leave a Comment

The world is complex. Speech pathologists are busy. Many of us are inundated with information. Most of us are juggling work and family commitments. Quite the recipe for procrastination, getting overwhelmed, and indecision!

Productivity tools and systems help but you need mental models

Trying to remember and prioritise lists of random things – from upcoming sessions, outstanding reports, phone calls to return, articles to read, supplies to order, bills to pay, tax statements to submit – is exhausting and stressful. Productivity tools, such as the Pomodoro technique, can help. So, too, can investing in the right systems, templates and resources. But none of those things help us to make decisions.

In private practice, we all make hundreds of decisions – big and small – every week. One way to clear away clutter, sift information, and to make decisions, is to use mental models: simple representations of reality that enable us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

You are already using mental models for clinical decisions

At University, most of us were trained to use mental models to make clinical decisions. For example, most of use elements of the ICF Framework, the Participation Model, and/or the EB3P model to plan and deliver services. As professionals, we are also required to adopt an ethics framework – whether it be Beauchamp & Childress’ biomedical framework underpinning our Code of Ethics, casuistry, or another framework altogether. In devising therapy goals, most of us use models of typical development, or evidence-based therapies that are themselves built on models of speech and language, e.g. Blanks Levels or Complexity theory.

But what about mental models to help with business decisions?

Here are 8 mental models I use to make business decisions in my practice:

1.Know your Circle of Competence: I spent a lot of my early professional years pretending I knew everything – even to myself. This left me with lots of blind spots that ultimately hampered my professional development. These days, I know what I understand, and am very honest with myself about what I don’t know. When I don’t know something clinically important, I add it to the list of things to investigate. In the context of my private practice, some of the product of this work evolved into the Banter Speech blogs and ebooks. Understanding my circle of competence helps me know when to seek help, and where to spend time and money improving my skills (and the skills of my team).

2. SCAMPER your services: As speech pathology services globalise and become more innovative, we need to think about how to deliver new services, and to deliver existing services differently. One way to think creatively about service design and delivery is to use the SCAMPER model, developed by Bob Eberle. It helps people to improve their products and services by asking the following seven key questions (originally developed by Alex Osborn):

  • Substitute: can you substitute people, components, or materials?
  • Combine: Can you combine with other functions or things?
  • Adapt: Can you adapt functions or visual appearance?
  • Modify: Can you modify the size, shape, texture, or acoustics?
  • Put to other use: Can you find other, new, combined uses?
  • Eliminate: Can you reduce, simplify, or eliminate anything you don’t need?
  • Reverse: Can you use it for the opposite effect, or invert or reverse it?

3. Apply Hanlon’s Razor to keep perspective: Private practice can be a hot bed of paranoia and second-guessing, especially when it comes to things like negative online feedback and staffing issues. Hanlon’s Razor tells us we should not assume that people are acting with malice when we have a misunderstanding, disagreement, or receive negative feedback. If we assume that all criticism is from someone “out to get us” or someone “trying it on”, we miss opportunities to consider simple solutions, such as apologies, better systems, or more education, that makes what we do better for everyone involved. People have bad days. People make mistakes. People do things without thinking them through, especially on the Internet. If we give our staff and clients the benefit of the doubt by not projecting ill-intent onto their acts, and respond constructively, we tend to feel better about our practices and ourselves (and so do our staff and clients). 

4. Exploit the magic of compounding: The process of adding interest to a fixed sum, which then earns interest on the principal and the interest added, then repeats forever, can reap enormous business rewards over time. Borrowed from the world of maths and underpinning the time value of money, compounding refers to the exponential effect that small, regular efforts can have on real world outcomes over time. In our practice, we find that working even a little bit on projects every day almost always results in better outcomes than trying to find (often non-existent) blocks of time to dedicate to projects. Breaking projects into small chunks also makes them less daunting, lowering resistance to sitting down and getting the work done.

5. Deal with the harsh realities of the Red Queen Effect: As the Red Queen says to Alice in C.S. Lewis’ Through the Looking Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. In a competitive market for services, standing still means going backwards. Every year, we discharge clients and must attract new ones; and we may lose staff and have to replace them. To thrive, we have to first deal with the “churn” of clients and staff, before considering growth plans. If we fail to account for churn, we’ll find ourselves over-stretched and behind competitors who manage their own churn more efficiently.

6. Understand Dunbar’s Number: This is the number of individuals a primate can get to know and trust deeply, and is related to the size of the primate’s neocortex. For humans, the number is around 150 individuals (with a range of ~100-250). Dunbar himself expressed the rule informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar”. Although the network effect tells us that organisations like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter become more valuable as more people join them, the Dunbar effect reminds us that there is a limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable, inter-personal relationships. It also explains why larger communities (including communities of speech pathologists) need laws, regulations, and rules of conduct to function effectively.

7. Improve team performance with the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model:  This is a simple model for building a team to carry out projects. If you treat your practice as an ongoing project, Drexler/Sibbet’s model can help you think about how your team members are interacting and how the team is performing.

Source/Credit: httpss://davidsibbet.com/process-models/

8. Use your stakeholders’ “Narrative Instincts”: We are wired to tell stories. We are also wired to listen to them. If you want to help educate or persuade people to your cause, frame your facts within stories. You may have noticed me not so subtly using the tactic in this very blog!

Further reading and free resources to help you choose mental models to help make business and life decisions

One of my favourite resources for thinking about thinking is the Farnam Street Blog and their equally thought-provoking podcast. See their amazing list of mental models here. 

I also recommend the The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler, which summarises 50 models for strategic thinking.

Image: httpss://tinyurl.com/yxnqx2zs

Can employers access employees’ personal phones?

13 January 2019 By David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Like too many employment law issues in Australia, the answer is that: “it depends”.

The rise of the personal smart phone

  • When I was a young man, it was common for employers to issue employees with IT-approved “work” phones. Many of us had two phones: one for business, and another for personal calls.
  • These days, it seems like many (if not most) private practices no longer provide staff with phones. Instead, employees access their employers’ email and other systems through their own, personal smart phones.
  • Like most speech pathologists, on my phone, I have a mixture of business and personal information contained in emails and through various client and IT management systems accessible through apps. My employees are in the same boat.

Work information belongs to employers

  • Information employers provide to staff during the course of their employment belongs to employers.
  • Client information is, of course, confidential. Express and implied terms of employment protect employers’ ownership of that information, even if it is stored on an employee’s phone.

Read your contracts and workplace policies

  • There is no general legal right for an employer to search an employee’s phone. But employers can take steps to ensure employees are meeting their obligations under their employment contracts and workplace policies.
  • Employers can only inspect employees’ phones if:
    • they have an express right to do so under:
      • an employment contract; or
      • a workplace policy (e.g. an Acceptable IT Use Policy, or Investigations Policy, or Code of Conduct); and/or
    • where they instruct an employee to hand over their phone and it is a “reasonable and lawful instruction”.

Workplace investigations and privacy considerations

  • Employers will have good grounds for instructing an employee to hand over their phone for inspection if they have reasonable grounds to suspect that evidence of a breach of a workplace policy, employment contract and/or other misconduct will be found on the phone, e.g. that the employers’ intellectual property or confidential information has been stolen, or that workplace safety or anti-discrimination laws have been broken.
  • Because an employee’s phone will probably contain personal information about the employee that has nothing to do with work, employers need to think about the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) when accessing an employee’s phone. But exemptions exist for “employee records” and also where the employer “has reason to suspect unlawful activity or misconduct of a serious nature” and “reasonably believes that the collection or use is necessary to take appropriate action”, which, together may cover most of the employment-related material of interest to the employer. (Remember that the Privacy Act applies to private practices of any size, because we are health businesses.)

The employer owns the work WiFi system

  • The employer owns the practice’s WiFi system, and so will have the right to monitor employee access to practice systems using personal devices. But care needs to be taken to comply with State and Commonwealth workplace surveillance laws. For example:
    • in NSW, employers cannot carry out surveillance of an employee’s phone/computer without prior notice in writing and a policy (see s10 of the Workplace Surveillance Act 2005 (NSW)); and
    • under Commonwealth laws, employers have to notify employees of any listening to or recordings of workplace communications, including phone calls and emails (Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth)).
  • The Federal Court held in Griffiths v Rose [2011] FCA 30 that an employer’s monitoring of its employees use of work-provided IT equipment to ensure compliance with the employer’s code of conduct, was lawful under the Privacy Act. Logically, some lawyers think this would apply to an employee’s use of a personal device via the practice WiFi system.

Bottom line

Employers and employees should review their employment contracts and workplace policies to assess whether employers have the express right to access employees’ phones and, if so, in what circumstances. If there is a workplace investigation into an employee’s conduct, it is very common for the employee to be asked to give the employer access to his/her phone for the purposes of conducting the investigation. When an employee refuses, the key legal issue is whether the request was lawful and reasonable in the circumstances. Employees should be aware that, generally, employers own information created by employees during the course of their employment, and own workplace WiFi systems.

Disclaimer: The information in this article is for general information purposes only and is not legal advice. This article is current as at the date of its publication. This article does not constitute any kind of legal advice, opinion or recommendation about rights, obligations, remedies, defences, options, or strategies. It cannot be relied on by any person for any purpose. If this article raises any issues for your practice, you should seek independent legal advice based on the facts and circumstances of your situation.

Related articles:

  • The tech-savvy speech pathologist: 5 technology-based ethics challenges and how to tackle them

Key source: De Flamingh, J. & Magness, P. (2018). The limitations of a modern day bag search. Law Society Journal, 48(76-77).

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