All About Teletherapy- Episode 40 – Season 3 wrap-up with Stacy Crouse, SLP

Welcome back to The All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and today we are celebrating Episode 40 and the end of season three, another 10 amazing episodes of the podcast!!!!! I am so grateful to each and every one of you who listen to the podcast, and for sharing it with your friends and in your Facebook groups and in your support groups. I really, really appreciate it and I’m so grateful that you’re listening and to be having these incredible conversations. From the beginning, you guys know this podcast is all about connecting with you guys and having a dialogue. It’s not just me speaking, you know, and lecturing and saying what I think but it’s really important for me to bring on other voices and other stories and perspectives so that we can all learn from one another.

Before I jump into the interview with Stacy Crouse, who has been doing teletherapy for years and she shares some of her greatest tips both for new therapist learning the whole world of teletherapy and for how parents can support their children from home while they’re doing online therapy. But before we jump into that conversation, I would just like to take a few minutes to do a recap of season three. And if you haven’t heard any of the episodes, definitely go back and listen.

Season Three started off with an incredible interview with Mama Manon, who is a parenting coach with her perspective of looking at connection and how can we get close to our children by being really present and seeing what their needs are in the moment and what our needs are in every situation. Lots of amazing tips there for connecting and for remaining present in prioritizing getting to know our children, definitely check out Episode 31 for that interview with Mama Manon.

Now, you guys know that I love audiology and I can talk about it all day and get really excited about the details and things that we can learn. But it’s also really important for me not to only speak in jargon, and use all this medical terminology. I want to know how is this affecting your life, your experience, and how the things that we’re doing in the audiology clinic and during testing appointments, how that applies to you and what that means for you, your family and your child. And that’s why I was very excited about Episode 33, with Dr. Julie Renshaw, and we talked all about the audiology equipment. You’d think that episode is very technical, but in fact, it was a lot about how we use the equipment to get the information that we need and how we can have the parents be a partner in that journey. Dr. Renshaw shared her experience and her tips for new clinicians. So, a lot of you student audiology listeners out there really loved that episode. And it was also beautiful to hear how she includes parents in a diagnostic evaluation so that they can also be following along and understand what the testing means. That was Episode 33. You can go check that out.

Of course, all of these will be linked in the show notes with full transcripts of every episode as always, and then it was March of 2020. And that’s just about the time that the COVID-19 pandemic was really affecting many, many millions of people all around the world, with many of us staying at home with our children. And on episode 34, I had the autism educator, Amanda McGuinness, from Ireland, come on the show and share about the social story that she put together. And that was really going viral for people to be able to use that resource with their children to explain why all these changes were going on. And that’s a theme with the work that I do, and the message of the podcast is to truly truly see your child as a full human being, no matter what’s going on, and no matter what challenges they are facing. We can find a way to communicate with them to try and make them feel safe and to really be partners together.

Then Episode 35 was the long awaited tinnitus episode. I had actually recorded this episode previously as a solo podcast. But when I connected with Dr. Kelly Dyson, I was ecstatic because this is her area of expertise. And she had so many great tips explaining what tinnitus is, how we can test for it and what we can do about it, how to cope with tinnitus. That episode, episode 35 all about tinnitus was the most downloaded episode this season, which was followed by Episode 37 with Colleen Wilkinson. This was about bringing trauma informed practice to everything that you do, both for the professionals who are working and for parents to have an outlook on what is trauma, and how can we build resilience? That’s Episode 37.

In our most recent episode, Episode 39 was all about balance with occupational therapist Michelle Riddle. And again, we take these complicated technical pathways of how our vestibular system, the balance, interacts with our auditory system, our hearing, and our visual system so that all three of these systems work together to help us stay steady and keep ourselves balanced in space. And in that episode 39, you can hear a lots of great tips on how to support your child’s education and their development from a really holistic perspective that’s looking at all these different systems, and really seeing it from a functional perspective. So, if you missed any of those episodes, or if you’re new around here, definitely go back and listen to some of the episodes from season three. And absolutely from seasons two and one.

I recently got a message from an audiology student who told me on Instagram, that they went all the way back to one and are listening in order and that made me so happy and so excited, because there, in the beginning, definitely was more of a structure to what was going on and now I see the podcast as a place where we can really come together in an interdisciplinary way. I believe we have something to learn from every single person we meet and I cannot wait for season four. I already have three or four episodes in the works and I will not do any spoilers so you will just have to stick around. Hahahaha! But I do usually give sneak peeks on my Instagram so you can follow me @allaboutaudiologypodcast.

Now jumping into today’s topic, we are talking about telehealth and telepractice. This is something that many of us have had to adapt to in the last couple of months being home and doing school online. And that comes with a lot of challenges and some opportunities. So, I’m so happy to bring you this conversation I had with Stacy Crouse, who is a longtime tele therapist, speech language pathologist, and she explains how speech therapy can be done online. some great tips and lots of resources.

So here it is:

Dr. Lilach Saperstein: “Today I want to welcome Stacy Crouse. So, recently the whole world has shifted to online, post-COVID era. It’s like before Corona and then after Corona, that’s like the new timeline of life? But you have been doing this for a long time. So, I’m so excited to have Stacy with us today. And we’re going to be talking about teletherapy and how to use the internet to provide services and how to make the most of it.”

Stacy: “Yes.”

LS: “Welcome. Welcome, Stacy. Thank you for coming.”

SC: “I’m excited to be here.”

LS: “Stacy, tell us a little bit about yourself.”

SC: “Let’s see. I graduated in 2008 with my master’s and then started working in an outpatient clinic setting for pretty much the next decade in some capacity, and at about 2014, I started to do a little bit of teletherapy on my days off. And then I kind of slowly added more days of teletherapy and decreased my in person or my face to face days in the clinic. So, I was doing like two days teletherapy, three days, face to face and then it was like four days teletherapy and one day face to face. Anyway, since about 2017 I’ve done full time teletherapy, I do K through 12. They attend a virtual school, a public charter Virtual Academy. So, I see kids, mostly in California and Utah right now. I really like just seeing that whole range of ages.”

LS: “That’s very interesting. So, these are students who are doing virtual school all the time.”

SC: “Yeah, yes.”

LS: “And what would be the main reason or motivation for students to be in that kind of setup?”

SC: “Well, for California, especially just the schools are really populated. And so, I think, you know, there are these other options. Virtual schools are really pretty po