Klatte et al. (2025). Collaborative working with parents of children with DLD in speech and language therapy: Identifying Dutch speech and language therapists’ barriers to enhancing practice. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 156, 104882. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2024.104882
It is generally accepted that it is important to involve families in decision-making in the context of health and wellbeing interventions for young children. Such family-centred care requires collaboration between families and the professionals providing the services. This collaboration involves joint input on goals, planning, implementation and evaluation. In some contexts, a move to family-centred care requires practice change. Past studies by this author group have focused on identifying collaboration in behavioural terms, choosing select behaviours to target for change, and how to implement the behaviour for change. The current study focused on what needed to change in order to adopt the target behaviours.
In this study, focus groups were conducted with speech-language therapists (SLTs) in the Netherlands. Either in preparation for or during the focus groups, participants completed three assignments focused on (1) describing a challenging collaboration, (2) identifying parent priorities, or (3) establishing goals. Participants placed figures to position the parent, child and themselves for collaboration. They also wrote down their thoughts, feelings and actions. Participants then discussed their responses as a group. Results revealed two types of beliefs: beliefs about how SLTs can be supported in collaborating with parents (i.e., need for confidence, knowledge, skills) and (2) beliefs that are in conflict with collaborative working with parents (i.e., related to professional identity, consequences, emotion, environmental context and resources, social influences). More specifically, SLTs reported feeling pressure from parents, society and health insurances to spend their time on working directly with children, which hinders collaborating with parents.
It can be challenging for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and SLTs to work collaboratively with parents in the context of high service demands. One important goal in this area would be to increase SLP/SLTs confidence in collaboration skills.