Hello, Prospective SLPs! Last week we discussed the medical side of our field. This week we will focus on one setting within the medical field - home health. Home health positions are typically very collaborative in nature. When a patient is in need of home health services, they often need to receive services in various domains, including speech-language pathology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, various nursing services, etc.

Since one or only a few service providers are with the patient at any given time, the team works together to facilitate improvement across areas. The SLP may be working with a patients swallow, the OT with fine motor skills for dressing, and the PT with walking from the bed to the couch in the living room. The PT and OT might be able to make observations regarding the patients swallow and report their observations to the SLP. The SLP could ask the patient to move from the bed to the couch in the living room to work toward gross motor goals. Sometimes providers may be at the patients house at the same time and be able to consult with the patient on how they are feeling in order to adapt the plan of care.

If you like the idea of seeing patients for a few weeks to a few months, then home health would likely be desirable to you! The average length of stay for home health is around 37 days, so as an SLP in home health, you receive new patients and discharge patients frequently.

Resource of the Week 🧰

Last week, we gave you a Praxis study guide for chapter one of the "Advanced Review” books often used by SLP graduate students preparing for the Praxis exam. In continuation of this, this week we have a study guide for chapter two in the book, an informational chapter on physiological and acoustic phonetics.

A few spots in this review have blank spaces within tables so that you can fill them out as review. If you want to make edits to this, just (please) make a copy and type away!

Today’s Posting 💵

Our posting this week is on the West coast in California. 21st Century Home Health Services in the Bay Area provides home health services including speech therapy, OT, PT, skilled nursing services, and social work. This company currently has an opening serving the Stanislaus county area with a listed pay range of $110,000-$125,000 yearly. As a home health clinician, you are responsible for driving to patients homes and providing services, but typically in home health, you can set your own hours/ appointment times with patients in addition to receiving mileage reimbursement.

In general, some home health positions can cover large areas, but specific companies and/or postings use smaller coverage areas as an incentive to sign on with them. Home health patients often have been recently discharged from acute care and skilled nursing facilities, no longer needing that level of care, but have a continued need for services. Others are living in their homes and may have recently begun demonstrating difficulties with safe swallowing, spoken language skills, memory, language retrieval, and so on.

Fun Fact 📌📔

About 70% of all home health care patients are aged 70 and up, so if you want to work with a geriatric population, this setting may be for you! The most common medical diagnosis of home health care patients is CVA (stroke) and the most common measure scored by SLPs in home health care is in the area of swallowing.

If you want to read more about home health for SLPs, click here.

Thank you for reading The Prospective SLP newsletter! If you have suggestions, feedback, or ideas on topics you would like to see in the newsletter, please reply to this email and let me know what those things are. 😄 Talk soon,

— Meryl