Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. We are excited to be kicking off a new series all about referrals. We are going to be spending the next month or two diving into this topic, because it's an area that a lot of us struggle with when it comes to our workload.

We sent out a survey to the SLP now email list and 434 SLPs responded and shared their feedback in terms of how they're managing referrals and what it looks like and what the struggles are. And so we have some really, really good data.

We asked the years of experience and the setting and the basic demographics It feels very representative of, the school-based SLP world.

I'm really excited to share this with you. Today we are going to be diving into the five common areas that came up, in terms of areas that SLPs are struggling with when it comes to referrals. the goal of this episode is to set the stage and identify what we're seeing as the trends. Hopefully if you are struggling with referrals, you'll realize that you're not alone in this. We are going to spend the next month, and even more time breaking this down and making it more manageable for all of us, because there are major challenges when navigating our referrals.

Let's dive into the five areas that we identified after hearing from 434 SLPs.

The first challenge was incomplete background information. It's really challenging to collect all the information we need from teachers and parents, to make an appropriate referral decision, and that takes a lot of time to coordinate with the teacher. A lot of us don't have a solid process in place either. sometimes we're trying to track down teachers and figure out what questions to ask them, and we may or may not have a form to help us with that. It is really challenging to get that solid background information to make an appropriate referral decision.

Number two was inappropriate referrals. There are two main types of inappropriate referrals. One is when teachers are over referring because they don't know what's developmentally appropriate or expected, and they may be referring for something that is typical for that age. So there definitely is some education that needs to happen to improve the quality of our referrals. And then the other aspect of that is inappropriate and premature referrals. If teachers are referring students without having implemented any interventions, it can be really hard for us to determine if a student really needs specially designed instruction, or if a simple intervention would do the trick. It's hard to make that. decision on whether we need to evaluate or not, if they haven't done that work, to set things up.

Then the third common struggle was that there's not a clear process. So every school, every teacher, every administrator seems to have different expectations around referrals and how to manage that. Every SLP does it a little differently. Maybe if there's 10 SLPs in the district. Everyone manages referrals differently, and it's different depending on the school you're in. If you're an SLP in a district and working in two schools, the referrals are handled differently from school A to school B, which makes it really hard to manage that.

The fourth common struggle is that we get a lot of referrals at once, especially in the spring. We may get 10 referrals on our desk at the same time. Having the capacity to navigate that on top of all the other things happening during that heavy referral season, which typically sounds like it's this spring.

The fifth common, struggle that SLPs were sharing was time. It is challenging and related to all of these pieces of having incomplete background information, inappropriate referrals, unclear, inconsistent processes across schools. And getting those referrals when our workload is already very high. During especially busy times of year, like when progress reports are due or, when we are having an influx of IEPs and evaluations on top of the referrals. so those are all things that lots of S LPs were sharing about. So if you're experiencing that, you're definitely not alone.

When we looked at the responses, the average time it takes to complete a referral is about three hours.

And the average that we calculated was that, SLPs are receiving about 15 referrals in a school year. If the average referral takes three hours and the average SLP gets 15 referrals, that's 45 hours of additional workload on top of meeting our students' service times and managing IEPs and evaluations many of these referrals turn into evaluations.

If we're getting inappropriate or premature referrals or whatnot, because we received the referral and we have that timeline, we might recommend an evaluation, and those evaluations take even more time. It makes sense why referrals are a big challenge for SLPs. if you have any unique insight or a challenge that you don't think we addressed, please reach out to me on Instagram.

I'd love to hear as we're going through this process and having this discussion. Our goal will be to share different strategies and tips. Some SLPs shared great strategies, in the form we sent out. I've been working on optimizing my own referral process and, helping other SLPs do the same.

So I'm really excited to continue this series. Again, reach out if you have any feedback, or unique experiences that you'd like to share. We'll see you next week to continue the conversation.