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Introduction Working within the frames of evidence-based practice, paediatric speech and language therapists (SLTs) should attend to parents’ values and preferences in order to provide the optimal service to a child and the child's family. However, little is known about how to elicit and include parents’ values and preferences in the clinical decision making about speech/language training for their child. Given that background, this study examined how five paediatric SLTs elicited and included parents’ values and preferences in clinical decisions about training for their children.
Methods Video recordings of clinical encounters between the SLTs and parents of children with speech/language disorders were transcribed and a broad-brush analysis, drawing on principles of conversation analysis (CA), was carried out.
Results A central finding was that explicit inclusion of the parents’ values and preferences in the decision making about the training was only sporadically identified in the encounters. Rather, decisions about whether speech/language training was going to take place, who would perform the training with the child and what should be the focus for the language training appeared to be primarily made by the SLTs, with minimal inclusion of the parents’ values and preferences.
Discussion/conclusion Potential impacting factors included the local context, the parents’ psychological readiness to contribute to the decision making and a potential discrepancy between SLTs’ and parents’ focus on outcomes for the child. Further research is needed to establish how parents’ values and preferences might be included in the evidence base for interventions for children with speech/language disorders.
