Mentorship Is Broken—and New SLPs Are Paying the Price

Jeanette Benigas56min

Jeanette Benigas

00:00

Hey, fixers. I'm Dr Jeanette Benigas, the owner of Fix SLP, a grassroots advocacy firm here to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology by driving real change from insurance regulations to removing barriers that prevent full autonomy like the CCC, this podcast is your space to learn, engage and take action in the field of speech language pathology. We don't wait for change. We make it so let's fix SLP!

Jeanette Benigas

00:40

Hey

Jeanette Benigas

00:46

Hey everybody, welcome back. It's Jeanette. No Preston today. Preston, I don't know, like, let me know, like, three hours ago that he couldn't record this week - not really. He had something come up. Couldn't record. And so we had some special guests that we were planning on inviting, maybe for our summer series that we're planning right now. So I'll just say it because we're getting ready to put it out soon. Last summer, we took a break. This summer, we are going to go straight through with 12 summer episodes, and we're going to call it our summer school series. They're just going to be shorter episodes, so instead of like, 45 minutes to an hour, they're going to be 20 to 30 minutes. And we'll be bringing on guests every week to address some of the most asked questions, or some of the kinds of things we're still seeing on social media that we're still talking about. So we'll be addressing those in different ways all summer, and hopefully having some fun, because we'll be rebranding at some point, and what we were pushing our website launch back just a little bit to the end of summer school, but yeah, so we were gonna ask these two on for summer school, but Preston loses, so I have Nikki and Hylan. And what is the name of your company? I venture to say a lot of people haven't heard about it. So tell us you are, what your company is, what you do, do that, do all those things.

Hylan Noble

02:07

So I'm Hylan. I am originally from Alabama. Went to school at the University of Alabama, Roll Tide. I'm a big football, basketball, sports college fan. And after graduate school, I actually, well, I worked at Vanderbilt for a while at their treatment Research Institute for autism spectrum disorders, and that's where I fell in love with speech language pathology. And I did a lot of research, and I thought I wanted to be a developmental psychologist. And turns out that when I worked with the speech language pathologist, I was like, No way. I love all things communication, seeing these therapists be a part of this journey of communication with a family from from the beginning and along the way for those milestones, that's exactly what I want to do. So went back to graduate school, and then I moved to San Diego, so I'm currently in San Diego, and I have been in private practice ever since, and that's actually where Nikki and I met, and we were very kindred spirits. We met in a private practice and became close. And then our journey and our path took us in a really, really cool direction. So I'll let Nikki kind of take over from here.

Nikki Rosner

03:12

I'm Nikki. I am originally from Southern California. I went to San Diego State University for my undergrad and my grad program, and I'm currently in Illinois. It's very cold here. It's very different. Lived in Miami, Florida before, so we bounced all over. My husband and I, and I've been in pediatric private practice my entire career, and I love it a lot. And Hylan and I met actually in a private practice, and that's where we we just had a lot of fun within therapy together. We shared a wall we would knock back and forth with our kids. It was a lot of fun. And then we worked at a private practice, and we mentored over 24 SLPs across different states, and supervised a lot of new grads. And from there, we kind of found that we didn't see the mentorship outside of our clinic in the way that we knew it could be. And we kept getting all of the new grads come to us and they'd say, can you just talk to my friend if they just had, like, a Nikki and Hylan? If you just talk to my friend, I think you could really help. They're just really struggling, and they just wish they had a Nikki and Hylan. So from that it was just became a dream of ours to be able to create our business, the mentorship collective, and that is where we are solely helping new graduates understand how to provide therapy, how to look at the whole child. And it's not very specific to one type of therapy. It's really looking at a child and figuring out, where do you start? What do you do when you walk into a room with a family, and so we created a program on there to support you through your first years as an SLP, to really help you thrive and not burn out. And so that's where we came in with the mentorship collective, and we also have a private practice. So Hylan, I'll let you talk about that.

Jeanette Benigas

05:00

That. Wait, I have a question. Yeah, so you said you're supporting people. You said, like looking at the whole child, and what do you do? So is the mentorship collective for people in private practice? Only? Is it for people in schools in private practice, or is this also something that would benefit our med SLP new grads?

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