Hello, there. I am so looking forward to continuing our conversation around referrals. Last week, we talked about the struggles that SLPs face when it comes to referrals, based on our survey of over 400 school-based SLPs. If you're listening to this episode, you are probably an SLP who is struggling with referrals or at least want to make referrals easier.

And I have five questions to help you start that process and figure out how you can make referrals easier for yourself. Jot down a quick note anytime you say yes to these five questions. It'll help us come up with our game plan for how to move forward. The first question is, do you have to chase down teachers or parents for information every time? When you receive a referral, are you having to run around to get the information that you need to make your decision? This is a struggle that a lot of SLPs talked about in our survey. If you're answering yes to this, you can start thinking about some teacher and parent input forms.

A lot of SLPs said that they use Google forms. We also have this built into SLP now in a HIPAA compliant way. By having a template in the form of a Google form or the SLP Now forms, you don't have to waste time thinking about what questions you're gonna ask. You have the templated way to organize it, and if you're in the habit of using paper forms instead of digital, this can save you time because you have all of the information in one place versus having to organize all of the papers.

One thing that an SLP said in our surveys was that collecting all the background information and accessing the student's academic history is almost more work than an evaluation. A referral should not be more work than an evaluation. We need an easy, streamlined way to collect that information and quickly make those decisions.

By having a streamlined process that includes a form, you can potentially save hours with each referral depending on how much time you're already spending.

Question two is, do most of your referrals result in not eligible or RTI needed first? Are you getting a lot of inappropriate referrals where you are having to say, "No, they're not eligible. They need intervention." We really should be getting high quality referrals that generally lead to an evaluation.

Hopefully there's enough supports upfront where anytime we receive a referral, it is a very high quality referral, when they've exhausted their resources and we really need some help. If you are having a lot of those not eligible or RTI needed first referrals, that is a red flag that, we need to educate our teachers and maybe teach them about developmental milestones and when it is appropriate to refer, or arming them with different interventions that they can use.

And it makes sure that they're supporting students before it gets to a special education decision. A quote from our surveys was that teachers make referrals for every minor speech error and administrators are making language referrals in place of full psych evaluation.

So again, those are some examples of what this might look like, where we're not getting appropriate referrals and we need to do some education. I'm presenting at the SLP Summit , and I am going to be sharing handouts to help you with educating teachers and administrators, in terms of what makes an appropriate referral and what is appropriate for each grade level.

It's an epic bundle of handouts and resources, and anyone who attends my presentation will get this handout. So, head to SLPsummit.com if you wanna check that out. I'm really excited to, share even more tips around referrals, but then also help you, by giving you these free resources that you can use right off the bat.

Question number three is, can you describe your referral workflow in under 30 seconds? In the survey, a lot of SLPs said that they don't have a clear or consistent process. They're reinventing the wheel every time.

One SLP said, no, I'm just winging it every time. The cost of winging it is really so much extra time and so much stress. If you're having to figure out what to do for every referral versus if you have a three step process of I send out the form, I do this, and then I do this, and then the referral is taken care of, it reduces the mental load and decreases the time it takes to manage your referrals. It also improves the quality because every student is getting the same quality of referral and consideration, not skimping on some students versus others. My SLP Summit presentation will walk through, an example of a process and how you can build your own workflow, and it really should just be a couple simple steps. This may vary depending on your district's requirements, but we really should be able to keep it short and simple.

My fourth question is, do referrals feel like a surprise flood? Are there seasons where you are getting tons of referrals, and feeling really overwhelmed? This typically happens in the spring when teachers are realizing that it's time for students to move to the next grade and they're realizing that maybe they didn't do everything that they wanted to.

If you're answering yes to this, you might consider front loading our teacher training, or at least tracking patterns and trying to find ways to make this more manageable. Increasing the quality of our referrals and providing teachers with interventions, they, should be able to more quickly identify students who might need support.

They can consult with you for help on interventions earlier on so that when it gets to the end of the year, they feel confident that the student actually made progress and doesn't need that support. Or they can decide earlier like, oh, I implemented these interventions and it is very clear that this didn't do the trick.

So that is question number four. Do you have a flood of referrals at a certain time of year? You can consider teacher training, proactive screening and other strategies depending on where you are in the journey. If you're feeling like you don't have a process at all, it might be helpful to think about training teachers.

If you have a streamlined process and you're still having floods of referrals and educating your teachers, you might consider doing more proactive screenings or providing more teacher support in specific areas based on what you're seeing.

And that brings us to question number five. Are referrals taking you more than three hours on average? In the survey results, the average time that SLPs indicated they were spending on referrals was about three hours. Ideally the time. you spend on referrals is much less than that but that's where we're sitting as an average.

so there's definitely room to reduce that. A great goal could be to get your referrals done in an hour or less. If you are in the camp of referrals taking 3, 4, 5, or more hours, next time you have a referral, think about what's taking the most time?

Or maybe think back on your past referrals and where have you spent most of your time? Is it the paperwork? Is it trying to hunt down information? Is it the inappropriate referrals? You might also consider the number of referrals. You can ask your colleagues, how many referrals are you getting in the different schools?

And that could be a strategy to think about too. As you're thinking about the steps of your referral process, you can think about, do I really need to do this? Is there a way to make this easier? Or do I need to do some upfront work to, maybe prevent the need for this step?

So those are our five questions. Question number one is, do you have to chase down teachers for information? Question two is, do a lot of your referrals result in not eligible or RTI needed first. Question number three is, can you describe your referral workflow in under 30 seconds or is it a very complicated process? Question number four is, do you ever have a flood of referrals? And then question number five is, are referrals taking you more than five or three hours on average? So how many yeses did you get? I'd love to hear where you're at. One or two or three yeses is a sign that you have some room to tune up your referrals and save yourself some time, and make your work life a little bit easier.

If you are wanting to learn more, please do join me at my SLP Summit presentation. You can sign up at slpsummit.com.

It is free to attend, and I'm going to be sharing a bundle of free handouts for anyone who attends. I'll see you next week as we continue this conversation, and I hope you have a fabulous week.