ASHA Focused Initiative

Personnel Issues in Healthcare and Education

First Quarter Progress Report
January-March 2007

For each of the 2007 Focused Initiatives, a work plan that includes the strategies to be completed in 2007 was developed. During the 1^st quarter of the year, the strategy implementation teams initiated activities necessary to complete the strategies by the dates indicated. View the 2007 work plan for each Focused Initiative. The following report highlights some of the actions that were initiated during the 1^st quarter and includes information on the status of all strategies included in the work plan at the end of the 1^st quarter. For additional information related to ASHA's Focused Initiatives please contact Stan Dublinske, Senior Advisor for Planning at sdublinske@asha.org.

1st Quarter Highlights

• The 2007 Health Care Survey has been fielded and contains questions related to shortages, attrition, and work conditions.
• Seven states (Arizona, Idaho, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia) have been determined to be most vulnerable to reductions in personnel qualifications for school-based SLPs or audiologists. Members in the targeted states are moving ahead with efforts to develop strategies for dealing with personnel issues, including ways to identify recruitment and retention incentives, establish state-wide committees to address the issue, identify good models, and promote legislative or regulatory efforts to maintain quality standards of practice.
• A Focus Group was held at the Health Care Conference to discuss barriers to student supervision in health care settings and how to offer learning experiences and mentoring for individuals who have been out of the profession or who want to change practice to health care settings.
• The National Coalition on Personnel Shortages in Special Education and Related Services, for which ASHA is the co-chair, met to discuss personnel shortages and strategies to deal with them at the state and local level. Coalition subcommittees also met to continue their goals which include: developing a Coalition Web site, creating a data fact sheet on personnel shortages across the professions, producing a power point presentation, and out reaching to policymaker groups including the National Governor's Association.
• ASHA exhibited at the annual convention of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and included information on ASHA's workload policy and on recruitment/retention of speech-language pathologists.
• State speech-language-hearing association presidents have been contacted with information pertaining to establishing a state advisory group of related service providers, consumer groups and parent networks, and other decision makers to work on issues related to the shortage of qualified personnel including recruitment and retention strategies and to advocate for the use of qualified personnel in schools.
• Developed a Reward Yourself campaign to make members aware of recruitment materials and the availability of an incentive ($50 voucher toward an ASHA product/service) to members who give a presentation about the professions to students in schools (K-12) or universities. Ads promoting the program were placed in The ASHA Leader and a marketing email was sent to school-based members, health care members and academia members promoting the $50.00 incentive.

There are 29 strategies in the Personnel Issues in Healthcare and Education work plan. Following is the status for the 1^st quarter.