We are discussing the biggest challenges that are currently holding back the field of speech language pathology.
We present the issues with facts and invite you to be part of joining our movement to make things better one conversation at a time.
Let's fix SLP.
Welcome back fixers.
This is Jeanette, we are jumping into another episode after a little hiatus for the holidays. So we're ready to get back into things with the new year. Normally, a lot has happened since the last time we recorded but this time we've, we had a little bump there with content, where we kind of went crazy, and then we just kind of took some time off. So we're back if you would like a review of everything that has happened since we started our platform on September 25 2023. Megan wrote a good blog post called TLDR 2023. You can find a link to that on our socials.
Also, I didn't know what TLDR meant until a few months ago. Because
not everybody knows that. You want to do you want to tell people who don't know what what that means?
I'm sure everybody listening to this already knows. And it didn't. But TL Dr means too long, didn't read.
Right. So
okay, so if all of our stuff was too long, didn't read.
Hop in there, fix slp.com. It's where the blog is. But you can also get to it through our socials. We want to thank all of you who have been giving us those five star reviews. We've been watching them tick up on Spotify. We've been watching them tick up on Apple podcasts. I know. Once or twice we've reported that we did make that top 100 list. I am so proud to report that we have peaked at number nine that happened a little while ago. So that was kind of Oh, yeah, you didn't see that. Didn't we? Didn't we? Oh, yeah, we keep number nine. There's an exact date it was only for a day but that hey, we got their
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I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately.
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Thank you to Texas SLP 2003, who says A must listen for any new or seasoned SLP. I've been an SLP for 20 years and learned more about my certification and how the field is regulated in the last few weeks and across my career. Kudos to make an engineer for asking the tough questions, finding the answers and starting overdue conversations within the field. SLPs have the right and responsibility to play an active role in cultivating and regulating our field.
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Thanks, guys. Yeah, thank you. It's great.
So, um, oh, no, go ahead. I was just gonna say some of the content that we posted at the end of December.
In included talking about the practice analysis, we had to pay Asha to access that we did a little crowdfunding campaign and a bunch of people donated $1. Thank you. If you were one of those people, we promised follow up. So we did post about that it was a tile I think of a carousel of 10 tiles. But Megan and I thought today that we talk about that a little more, and fill people in on what we found. Yeah. So
I am on virus. I don't know 12. Ish.
And I've decided that to have a child in daycare means to be chronically ill.
But I got to the point a few days ago where I was just watching reality television, watching Million Dollar Listing, which apparently is very entertaining to me to watch a Swedish person sell real estate in New York, or LA or wherever he was, but anyway,
As watching these this reality TV and watching the commercials that came on and multiple commercials came on for Phoenix University, which I think that's an online program, right? Like they just the University of Phoenix is university completely online. Yeah.
Okay, so their big thing right now is advertising competency based degree programs.
When I was like, wow, the University of Phoenix is advertising competency based programs for what I imagine are maybe less qualified programs than SOPs, degrees. Lila, yeah. So why are we doing this? Like, why has it taken so long for us to have this conversation. And we're still, like, stuck in this certification national exam model from the 70s, I guess, is, you know, 50 years ago, when that was popular. And now we're realizing with everything that's changing the way that education models are changing, access to the Internet access to information,
the way that we learn is completely different now, and exciting and innovative. And we can actually teach based on competencies. And so we're going to talk about the practice analysis today. But I just wanted to start with my story about the commercials that I saw, because I do think that the practice analysis really starts opening Pandora's box in the world of SLP. As far as how are we training people? How are we ensuring competency? And
is the model that we are currently all supporting by paying the 225 or whatever, every year?
Is that working for us? And we would argue that it's not, but we don't want to just tear something down. We'd like we have ideas to make it better. And so that's what we're going to talk about today.
The practice analysis is what Asha refers to. So when they say that the CCC is evidence based, they're referring to the practice analysis, when they say that the standards for the Council for academic accreditation, the program that accredits SLP grad school programs, when they say that those standards are evidence based, they're referring to the practice analysis. When they say that the Praxis exam, which is currently the only widely accepted national exam for SLPs is evidence based, they're referring to the practice analysis. So a lot is riding on this practice analysis, which is basically a survey completed by a number of SLPs.
And written by a group of 10, SLPs, sorry, 11, SLPs, seven of which are academic SLPs.
And basically, the people writing and completing the survey are trained to put a scale to all the different things SOP and be like, Okay, how much of this do you really need to know to do your job?
And then they rate those things like, Do you need to learn this in grad school? Do you need to learn this during your internships? Or do you need to learn this during your CF why? And I think this is why Asha argues that we need certification. Because in their mind, our training is not complete until we complete the CFI. So if we were to take the CFI away, and we were to take certification away, then we wouldn't be fully completing the competencies that are outlined in the practice analysis. Because the practice analysis is written in such a way that it's acknowledging that some of those skills aren't going to be learned until after you finish your grad school classes.
So that's, in my mind, it may be Jeanette, that you disagree, but in my mind, that's kind of a flaw of the way we have things set up right now is like everything like the entire system comes down to this one survey. That's basically set up where it's acknowledging that not everything is going to be learned in grad school. And, and like we have to show competency after we graduate, and the only way to show competency is to get your CCC, which again is what we've been saying all along is like maybe the CCC is just a one time milestone in your training and you achieve it once. And then it's done. It's not this perpetual subscriptions are service thing where it's tied into the membership.
I don't disagree with you. I agree.
I think that the nine month supervision The fellowship is a good idea for on the job training. But we've said it before the master's degree should really be enough.
If you're not, if we practice at the end, then we shouldn't be handed a degree. If it's that important to do that nine month training, then it needs to be part of the graduate experience. And we would never want our oncologist learning on the job giving us cancer treatment in the first nine months of that doctor's practice. So why is it okay for us to be learning on the job, really using our
or the children we serve the adults we serve using our patients and students and clients as guinea pigs, right? Like, it feels to me like that's what we do that we say, okay, you have this baseline learning.
Now go use guinea pigs while you really learn what to do right now, the master's degree should be enough. And all of it based on this one survey that really condenses it in makes this even more difficult. The word that comes to mind is gross.
Well, it's just I mean, it's just, it's, it's a self perpetuating system. So like, they did the last practice analysis and 2016, they just sent the survey out for the next one that they're going to publish it. So it just perpetuates this idea that the CF y and the CCC is necessary because Asha can continue to make the argument that the surveys supporting the need for a CFI and certification. Whereas again, we can look to OT and PT who have done PT in particular, has done a better job of expanding the degree to a doctorate level. And I'm not saying that's what we should do for SLP. But I'm just saying like, instead of creating a certification mess for PTS, like their solution was to extend the training program and add more clinical experience into it, bake more experience into it, and then you leave with a higher degree, which I think one could argue I don't know if I agree with this or not. But one could argue like that gives you more credibility, and maybe higher pay or more autonomy or things like that.
So that's a system that we can look to, to compare ourselves with just just to understand that like, there's different ways to approach this.
It also says that, you know, Asha can keep saying, Oh, the practice analysis indicates that these things are needed or the practice analysis is indicating that there needs to be some kind of change things that we shouldn't be those things. So how else can we adjusted, like you just said, how pte added the year and OTs added a year and AUD has added a year? How, how can this be changed? I think one of the issues though, is all of those professions are getting higher pay. And so that this, this wraps up into a ton of other issues that maybe we'll talk about in future episodes. But in order at the end of the day, in order for us to really increase pay, we have to increase reimbursement, which is outside of the practice analysis scope, right. So but I think it's it's an indicator for change, if Ash is going to come back and say, well, they CCC and the CFR needed really for competency. Maybe they're not and maybe we just need to implement something else. So those things are not needed. And I think we're saying the same thing, but that's how I think about it in my head.
Yeah. And I was thinking as you're talking an argument that I hear often for kind of against turning SLP into a doctorate program is like that would increase the barrier for people to get into the career.
And I just, again, maybe you disagree or have a perspective that I don't have, but I just don't see that happening. Like I think the barriers that exist are systemic barriers related to the GRE and GPA and crap like that where it like that doesn't, you can be a good student, you can get high numbers on those things, and we've talked about this, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a great clinician. So then that gets us into a whole other conversation about grad school requirements in admissions and those policies. But just to come back to like, SLP has a doctorate degree in increasing the barrier, and there's a shortage of SLPs, and all these things that always come up. I don't think there's a shortage of SLPs, I think there's probably a surplus at this point, I think there's a shortage of SLPs, who are willing to take the crappy job offers that are out there because of the surplus of SLPs.
And I think when we look at degree programs, like adding a year doesn't, it's not like you're having to get into grad school and then apply for another level of a degree like, it just it just adds a year basically, to the master's program.
And I didn't like when I got my degree in New Zealand, and they do three year bachelor degrees there where it was, it was gonna take, like five years in the United States. And so things are just much more efficient in New Zealand, and they don't have you, like, retake all the classes that you just took in high school. And so I think, like, it sounds like this big thing to like, make it a doctorate. And like that would just change everything. And it's like, in reality, it would change a lot of things. But it would just, it would just be adding that you're on. And like giving more support to students in clinical training, and then getting rid of this cf Why bullshit that isn't really, in a lot of cases, I think people don't feel supportive, because the people who are supervising them are not supported themselves. Like they're not getting paid to do it. They're not given given extra time to manage a supervisory role, which is extraordinary amount of work. So that that whole system is broken, so we could just do away with it, and then wrap it into the degree program.
Yeah. So I know that you have some places to be when we're done. So let's jump into this a little bit. So this, the survey is sent out to clinicians. And then it is sent out to everyone in the field. Correct. Everyone gets it that we know of you probably got it but may have deleted it.
How long does it maybe because they only send it out to like,
was it like 15,000? It's not a not everybody gets it? Okay, so not even everybody has a chance, which probably Oh, number one right there.
I feel Yeah. And I don't again, like that's like a statistic. thing that I don't fully, I don't care they Okay, yeah, I want everybody to have a chance everyone should have a chance and let unless you have unless they have well defined inclusion inclusionary criteria or an exclusionary criteria, every SLP should have a chance to answer if you are saying we want to see what's required in this field, then everybody should have a chance to give their opinion if they want to. Because when this did go out, a couple of people were posting it online. How long does it take to complete the survey? Megan?
About an hour, an hour? Are you compensated for this research? No, no. And I know not many people in our field are compensated for research, I get it.
But how much does Asha make a year?
On they're charging $44?
They couldn't give us a five to 10% discount on our yearly membership dues and CCC purchased? I mean, give us something because then to me, then this leads towards people answering who have the luxury of time.
Same kind of thing. I would tend to think academic SLPs are now more likely to answer this survey. Because one, I'm gonna say we because I am one of those we have an interest in research, we have an interest in contributing to the knowledge of the field whenever I'm able to if students or colleagues post surveys or research things to social media, and I'm able to do those things to help those people. Even though it's often not compensated, I do it because I want to contribute to the knowledge of our field. And I'm not saying that clinicians who aren't in academia don't want to do those things. That's certainly not the case. But we're given the freedom of time to be doing stuff like that. If you are working a job full time that requires you to be 80 or 90% productive and you're doing paperwork over your lunch.
shouldn't be by the way, or bringing paperwork home or whatever. You don't have time to sit down and do a one hour survey, you have yoga, you have pottery, you you have kids, you have to go sell Girl Scout cookies, right? Like there's there's not time to do this for the average every day clinician in our field. So we've already skewed the results by one not giving everyone a chance and to making it a freaking hour to complete, uncompensated.
Okay, I'm done. I was upset about it. When it came out. I was real upset about the amount of time
Yeah, it's a long time. And just to be clear, too, like OT and PT also have a practice analysis. It's a similar thing, similar type of survey used in similar ways. And both of them are freely available, you could go.
Yeah, so that's the next thing. uncompensated, takes an hour of your time. And then we went to access this thing, and we find out, Oh, it costs us money. It costs us money. Amazing. And it's not like it's just like, five bucks. $5. You know, it was $44. So here's another concept. Maybe you're not here to compensate us. But if we complete it, maybe you give us a free copy of the results. Right? The thing though this is being paid for by? Do
they get their money?
So why should members we should get?
Why the hell are we paying $44 to see the results of this survey that we contributed to? And when I say me, I don't mean me, because I did not fill it out this year. No, I'm not giving Asha any more of my time than I already have to. Okay, $44. And that is if you were a member. So for those of you who are worried about what membership benefits, you might lose, if you let your membership go for $26, you lose the ability to get the practice analysis for $44. If you aren't a member, you have to pay $54. And then when you get it like normally, if you get an article, you just get the article and you download the PDF. Oh no, not this one. It gets locked up in your Asha account and you have to read it through a reader. I couldn't access it.
You couldn't hear me you could not hit you couldn't give me that article. I can't get into your Asha kill. Yep. So one person can yes, it per purchase. That's right. Yeah. Do you think that their thinking behind this is like somebody's gonna use this practice analysis to create some sort of alternative certification product? Or like, I don't understand why they feel like they have to lock it behind a paywall? What if that's what Sally Smith wanted to do, then she would pay the $44 and go create whatever she wanted to create. I just think it's,
you know, I, I this is such this is such a soapbox for another time, but the charging of the charging for journals. And not just through Asha, but generally in science and research is a big problem in it. It is an access issue. But I mean, this just contributes to that when we've paid our membership when people have spent their time contributing to this knowledge, and then you lock it behind an expensive paywall. And then, what? So here's my question, Megan, what if you let your CCC and your membership go? Do you still have access to that? Can you still log in and read it?
I don't know. We should find out but your CCC.
But yeah, I also thank you to everybody who donated $1 Yes, sorry, people, Megan is unable to let you read it.
Okay, so of the people who completed the 2016 survey. So we already established that the majority of the people who wrote the survey were academic SLPs which again, I know that people listening to this if you're not going to academic SLP and you're feeling that feeling of like, you don't know what I've been through, I've been a practicing clinician. I know what it's like, oh, yeah, yes. I hear you. Also, when you enter the world of academia, it's a different world. It's not a better world. It's not a worse world. It's not a anything. It's just a different world. There's practicing nine to five jobs. And then there's academic positions. Just totally different careers in different perspectives. We absolutely need both. Together. We can do amazing things. You can't really be an amazing academic SLP and be practicing full time. That's just not possible like we all have to make
choices, and we choose one or the other. And you can kind of there's some people who can have chosen both worlds, but ultimately, academic SLPs. In general, this is my personal opinion, do not always have the full awareness of what's going on in the world as a practicing SLP. And so the fact that you had majority academic SLPs, writing this survey means that you missed out on a huge amount of perspective from practicing SLPs. And we could see that in the Write in comments at the end of the survey, where people were saying, over and over and over, we need modified barium swallow training we need.
These training we need like billing, training, coding training, like all of these things that practicing SLPs are aware of that weren't even in the survey, like, how did they not get into the survey. And so that's the people that wrote it. And then the people who completed it in 2016, I'm
57% of the sample. So 57% of the people completing the survey were clinical service providers, at a time when they made up about 75% of the population of SLPs. And then 12.3%, were university professors or instructors at a time when they made up 1.9% of this population. So this is in line with ashes, long history of prioritizing academic SLP voices. And that stems from the roots of the organization where it really was intended to be a scientific club. And they were wanting to establish themselves as this. I mean, they would call themselves like an elite scientific organization. And they wanted to separate themselves from educationist who had, quote, no scientific training or background.
And they wanted to be perceived as better than the rest, which is cool. That's great. That's fine. But it's resulted in this long standing culture of not really inviting, practicing SLPs to the table and viewing them as less than. And then when you have a practice analysis that's influencing literally every part of our training and credentialing. That's not really taking into account the voices of practicing clinicians. I think that's where we get to where we are now, where we have SLPs, who are saying over and over and over, I was not prepared to do my job. And then the gaslighting response is like, Okay, sure. But, you know, grad school training is foundational knowledge, like, we can't teach you everything in grad school. Yes, that's true. But also, I would argue that the CIA has not kept up with the ever expanding scope of this practice, especially in the medical SLP world. And that's why medical SOPs are just so vulnerable to these certifications that are 1000s of dollars. And all of these products, promising competency for medical SLPs because they leave these grad programs, maybe not near as Genet, but a lot of people leave grad school programs and go into medical jobs, where they're like, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. And I spent way too much time learning about how to address stuttering, and literacy and all of these things that have nothing to do with medical speech pathology. And that's a huge problem.
That's my soapbox for the day.
I mean, yes. We won't keep this I will I just Yes. If anything I say is gonna just repeat, we need to be concise. All right, we're being concise. What else about this practice analysis? was a little off. I will say that I am not.
I don't have a degree in statistics. And so like the way that they structured the survey is completely fine. Like they didn't do anything wrong. But I will say that the entire,
like, all of the standards for the grad school programs, all of the standards for the CCC and all of the questions on the practice, basically, Praxis basically come down to like, was it like 200? And, yeah, 253 hospital based SLPs, which is not an adequate sample, but this is what happens when you lump all SLPs together, and then you send out 15,000 survey requests. Like, technically those 253 hospital s SLPs represent the 12% of SLPs that work in the hospitals. But I would argue that too
253 people is not an adequate sample size to really understand what's needed if you're going to work in the hospitals.
And I wonder, too, without having looked at that, where did that sample come from? We're 50 of them from New York and one of them from Utah, were you what was the spread across the nation to was it a sample that was equally spread, because the issues and the things that you need to know, in one region might be different, for example, in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, where there is a lot of Mill Towns, Old Mill Towns, P older people in those areas suffer from different health issues that may be I don't know, Texas, I'm just making this up. But but you know, there's, there's different rates of head and neck cancer and, and, and issues that we as SLPs might deal with in different regions of the country simply because of environmental issues and things like that. And so, to me, that would be important to know is what was the spread, and was that collected equally. And again, when you're not sending it out to everyone, you're just, it's like you're throwing a feather in the air and seeing where it lands, just, you know, throw something at the wall and see if it sticks, you are not controlling your data collection, to make sure that you're getting an equal response from everywhere from the 200, or whatever. And I would even go a step further to ask that you said these were hospital based SLPs. What level promise center was it? Were these level one trauma centers? Were these little community hospitals that send out for everything where, you know, we have a little er here a few minutes away, and there are no beds there? There's no SLP there, of course, but you know, what, if there was it just you're gonna be getting hospital SLP isn't even enough, you need to be getting a sample of everyone who's practicing in this area and what they needed to know what was important to that job. And that, again, just speaks to this broad issue of we do so much how how can you sum this up from 200? Something people from 50 states that are all over the place?
Yeah, and they do. They do some statistical analysis, and they break it into northeast, south, Midwest and west. And theoretically, it's an equal sample across all of them. But I think you're right that we need practice and analysis by setting. So we need a school practice analysis, and we need a medical practice analysis with with the same with the with equivalent statistical accuracy. And so
that way, we would have more people
who work in medical based settings completing the survey.
And I would argue that you should have two separate teams of writers. So people writing the survey should have medical experience people writing the survey should have school experience. I know we're getting into a topic that's very controversial. And if you're listening to this, and you're like, No, we shouldn't split them, like we'll get we'll talk more about that later. But I think, again, personally, my opinion is like, the more that I see how the system is working, and when I look at things like this practice analysis, I'm like, it is stupid of us to not proactively as a field, recognize that the medical SLP part of things has just blossomed in the last 20 years. And it's amazing, and it's wonderful, but that that part of our profession is not adequately adequately being supported by any of this. And so like I said, not to repeat myself, but then you have people that are graduating and not feeling prepared. And that's just not, that's not who we want to be. That's not how we want to present as a profession that's not fair to consumers. All that.
Um,
one more thing to nitpick about the survey is, for some reason, and
I'm sure I mean, I just couldn't find a reason but like,
clinical SLPs who are clinically practicing, received a portion of the survey, whereas academic SLPs received the full survey. So that's where again, you're going to see since more academic SLPs are completing the full survey, it's going to
be skewed towards what academic SLPs
think it's important to do the job. And again, I'm I'm not saying that academic SLPs do not have that knowledge, I am saying that there are scenarios quite frequently, where somebody who's a faculty member has not been in a nine to five job, you know, for 510 1520 years. And so it's not, I just don't think that those are the people who should be filling out a survey saying like, hey, when I go into work tomorrow, these are the things that I need to be competent in.
And I think the whole conversation about the practice, or the practice analysis leads to, like we said at the beginning, and we'll have to wrap this up. But we can come back to this conversation later, but just like,
is this system working? And when we think about competency based training, is this practice analysis, strong enough to be defining what those competencies are? And then beyond that, do we have research or knowledge of how to best train those competencies and evaluate those competencies, and I don't think we have any systems in place for that. And Jeanette, that's why you talk about how hard it is to enter the world of academia into try to teach and like, you're just thrown into the wilderness, and you have no tools and no support, and you have to build everything from scratch. And that's hurting all of us. Yeah. And since we've started talking about this, I've had the opportunity to speak on the phone with a couple instructors, professors
who have sort of been in that position, or maybe haven't gotten the best student reviews. And I'm not saying I always do, but we've been able to collaborate a little bit. And I've been able to share some stuff and talk about what I found helpful or not. And so that that kind of mentoring takes time, but I'm always willing to do it for as long as I'm able, because
we need to do better in this area. But it should be better across the board. It shouldn't be me getting on the phone for an hour with a bunch with a bunch of different people, it should really just be much more easily access and
standardized, I guess, or at least a shell to you know, not that we're all going to give the same lecture or you know, that a shell to pull from or some kind of bank to pull from I don't know, but we could be doing with standardized curricula. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a problem.
The, I accidentally just clicked away from the post, but on the tile, here it is people want might want to circle back to, we included a bunch of responses that we cut and pasted from the survey itself, which are really interesting. There was a section for write in comments. And it what the title says is, these are comments that are very telling about what was not included in the practice analysis and should have been.
So take a look at those. They're really interesting. And we said, you know, maybe these things would have been included if more people were invited to represent practicing SLPs. Just some really, this is one I think everyone can relate to all read it says this may have been covered, and I missed it due to the wording but clinicians need to have training on speaking to supervisors and administrators. If given impossible caseload expectations, such as 90% productivity, many of these important aspects of treatment may be missed if a new clinician is expected to do direct therapy for 36 out of their 40 Hour Work Week. I think that could apply caseload and workload caps in the schools as well.
But yeah, we don't we don't teach students how to have those conversations. And it's getting worse and worse all the time. Right. Everybody's screaming about workload caseload and productivity.
Yeah.
Yes. So what we would like to see is number one, documents that are paid for by ASHA member dues be made available for free to ASHA members.
Number two, equal representation and practicing SLPs at all tables.
And number three, instead of using the practice analysis as a way to regulate the optional CCC on top of CAA standards, because this is all starting to get really redundant, especially with state licensing and interstate compact coming out. It should be used to create universal competency based curriculum curriculum and assessment standards, that degree should be enough to demonstrate entry level competency into the field. And this would ensure that instructors have high quality content to use in their classes. And that students have equal access to quality up to date education, and that they're being assessed on universal competency standards.
Great points. That's that's
there, we did it. We fixed it all. Fixing it.
We're trying guys are trying to fix it. One week at a time. I will give a quick Megan and I have not had a chance to meet about this yet. But for anyone who has been following the AC stuff, I will give a quick little update there. I did hear from a lawyer from Frankie Romick, it does not sound like the CCC signature is required, I need to look at that again or ask for clarification just to make sure I read that correctly. So it does appear that these are company specific policies. They also this this was their lawyer, that lawyer also passed the name of another lawyer who advocates for AAC didn't appear to be connected with pranky Romek, at all. But we plan to reach out to that lawyer to get some clarification. And so what it seems like we're heading towards is probably a call to action to maybe make a list of these AAC companies that are requiring signatures for the evaluation and a call to action to be writing a letter or something like that. Sorry. They're requiring signatures of CCC, a CCP signature. Yeah, yep. So someone without the CCC would not they could do the evaluation, but it would have to be co signed. So that would be anyone with a state license only, or someone in their professional year. So they again could do the evaluation could sign it. But then someone with the CCC would have to sign it. That's how it works at Tobii Dynavox. They've sort of stopped responding. So you know what, we'll before anyone does anything, we're going to talk to these lawyers get a little bit more information. But it does seem like that it is not an actual regulation that requires that signature of with a CCC. So probably a call to action coming that we would be asking these companies to lift that requirement. In less the order the device, order and evaluation is in a state that requires it for Medicaid billing and Medicaid is being billed in that case. So you know, if you're in a state that requires it for Medicaid billing, and you're ordering it for someone who has Medicare, or you're ordering it for a kiddo who's using private insurance, and you don't have your CCC in that case, you you still would be able to sign that evaluation, because Medicaid isn't involved. So it seemed to my right and that oh, sorry. No, I was saying it seems like this is a company specific policy, despite what some of them are saying it does not appear per the lawyer that wrote back to me just two days ago that it's required. Yeah. So this is another situation where it's a lot of rumors. And like somebody makes a list that's like, oh, federal regulation requires the CCC to sign off on an AAC device. But then when you go to look for the regulation, it's not there where Yeah, it's nowhere. And even the woman that I did talk to at Tobii Dynavox. Like read me some stuff and said she'd send it and it never got sent. And so I don't I believe that she sent it. Maybe she missed typed my email address. But I did not receive the regulations that she said she would send and I I don't think like what she was reading to me didn't sound like it was coming from a regulation. I think it was coming from one of these websites that I've read myself that say it's required, but really, where is that actual requirement on the regulation? I, I've not been able to find it. And we've put a lot of content up guys that shows regulation, you know, we're it shouldn't be this hard. It's maybe it is like digging a needle in a needle in a haystack. But in this case, I mean, this came from PRC lawyer, I'm going to trust that because they're billing. We've had people write to us who have said, I've done AAC evaluations and ordered devices and I don't have my CCC and no one has ever asked for it. So we've gotten reports like that. So we've been suspecting all along that it's not actually required.
This is a company specific policy. So again, we'll I'm slowly working on it. I'll do some more following up with this person and
As other lawyers name that we were provided, and then we'll we'll either have something to say or we'll have a call to action. And that's why it's important to continue to share our content. We need to grow, we need to grow this platform significantly. I mean, times multipliers of tents, because there are important calls to action coming, maybe not for four or five more months. But we had a meeting this morning, it's coming. We need more people. 10,000 is not enough. So even if you think there's nothing I can do, share this to the socials that you're in, share this on your personal pages, invite people to join, tag, do whatever. We're all in this together, Megan, and I can write emails and contact lawyers about AAC devices all day long. But when we have calls to action, if we don't have significant responses, nothing is going to change.
Oh, and also, yes, agreed. Sorry to cut you off. Yeah, that's fine. I was just gonna say also, we have our T shirt sales through January 12. So that's a great way to get the word out. And then any of the proceeds that come from those sales are going to help us with like podcasts, hosting podcasting, podcasting equipment, website, hosting all of the expenses that go into running the platform. Yep. So you can
find the link to the T shirts at fixed slp.com under quick links we don't have at the moment, you know, but that's something that maybe we'll consider in the future. Because we could use better equipment, we could use better software, all of this cost money to host Yeah, like social media planning tools. Those are a monthly subscription. Yeah. Sounds like and you know, we're, we're cashflow in it now. But the bigger we get, the more this cost. So yeah, the purchase of a T shirt would be great wear them to your state conventions. Invite Megan and I will wear them to sell.
And, uh, one more thing before we go. Um, I had been doing state interviews for our little SLP state by state podcast, the little extra fix that we've been putting out. I did one last night, I had something that people have been getting sick. So I've had two interviews scheduled that have now been cancelled that we're working on rescheduling. But if you are on a state association, executive board and you would like to come talk to us for about 1520 30 minutes, please get in touch with us team at fix slp.com We want to talk to you. We want to highlight your state associations and all the cool stuff that you're doing.
Yeah, anything else? Megan?
I think that's it. Thanks, Jeannette.
We'll see you next week. Thanks for fixing it, everybody. Bye bye.
