Australian families are facing wait times of up to four years for essential speech therapy. Rebecca Keeley, Speech pathologist and Founder of Yarn Speech, has released an app - a digital solution transforming Australian families access to critical speech pathology services. Peter Greco learns the details from Rebecca.
More info: Yarn Speech
Or if you have a child who is looking for a speech therapist, I'm sure you'd be well aware of how long the waiting list can be. Rebecca Keeley is doing something about it, and Rebecca's on the line. Rebecca, lovely to meet you. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for having me.
Just a bit about this. So you've obviously seen an issue and think, well, I can maybe kind of do something to to fill in a bit of a gap at the moment.
Yeah. So I worked as a speech pathologist for nearly a decade across rural and remote parts of the country. And during my time, it just felt like the waitlists were getting longer, not shorter. And eventually I got a little bit fed up. So I figured I'd go and build the tools that I'd wish I'd had in my job.
Okay, now, uh, it could be up to four years. Is that right? Waiting time.
Yeah, yeah. So we've had families we've spoken to that live in certain parts of the country. Like, for example, we had one family that we spoke to in the Murrumbidgee region of rural New South Wales, and she had three boys, all on the NDIS, and one of her children waited nearly five years to get in and see someone.
Yeah, I've been doing this program for a while. Rebecca, people often talk about early intervention is critical in kind of any area when you talk about disability. So I mean, speech pathology is obviously no different.
Exactly. I think it's it's well documented and well researched that it's important we get to kids at the earliest point that we can. But if you think that we need to usually get to children before they start school, but if you're going to wait five years to even get in, we almost need to refer kids at birth, which is just not possible.
Yeah, and I guess it's the old story about, you know, you don't get that chance back again. That time is gone and gone forever.
You really don't. And it's such a loss for not only the child and their family, but also, I think, society as a whole, because these kids end up with really long term challenges that can can take a really long time for the system to try and fix as they get older.
But we'll get to what you've done about it in a second. But I guess it's things like, you know, when they get to school Uh, you know, it can be childcare, etc. you know, things like bullying, that sort of thing can kind of come into play. So these are kind of, uh, things that, you know, just add to the whole stress of the situation.
Yeah. And I think, um, it's really challenging for the families who are out there trying to find somewhere to go. And they're doing everything that they can and they're doing everything right. And also on the flip side, I think the speech pathologists on the ground are also doing everything right. Don't want waitlists. They hate putting families on wait lists. I would know I was exactly the same, but there's just not enough of us to fill the demand of how many children in Australia need this communication support.
And we will get to what you've done about it, Rebecca. But that's another issue in itself, isn't it? I guess the the stress and the impact on the lives of speech pathologist. And I guess if they're not being able to function, uh, you know, to their 100%, if there's such a term, then, you know, the waitlist gets longer because speech pathologists are maybe not working to the capacity that they could 100%.
I 100%. I think we saw really significant burnout across particularly rural and remote clinicians, because you kind of live in the middle of nowhere. You could go out there to help these families and you deeply care about your communities. But when the waitlists are getting to two, three, four years long and you know that you can head back to the city and maybe have a little bit more of a manageable caseload. It's really hard to to convince people to remain out in these rural areas, even though they're such wonderful places to work.
Hard to get them out there in the first place. And then if that's the sort of quote unquote reception they get, then, as you say, it's not very welcoming or, you know, not much.
Incentive to.
Stick around.
It's really all about Rebecca. So what have you done about it?
Well, I took this crazy risk, I guess. And, um, I realized that what we were doing is putting families on the waitlist, but we weren't really giving them anything to do in that time because we didn't have capacity. Because we'd finally got to the kids that needed, you know, had waited and they were the kids that we were spending our time with. But I thought to myself, we can absolutely get families to to get moving at home. And so I felt like I knew what to do as a clinician, but I had no idea about running anything to do with tech. So I shipped myself off overseas and went and did a masters of Business at Oxford in the UK, and then came back to Australia with this idea of, well, maybe if we build active solutions for families using technology, then they can start to fix the problems at home while they're waiting before they get in to see a speech path. So we have built an app. It's called yarn speech. And what it does is it provides three evidence based daily activities that have been built by speech pathologists for you to help your child to get moving at home.
Fantastic. So you said a phrase there, evidence based. So I mean a great idea, but you've got some kind of science to back this up as well.
100%. So we've had clinicians who've fed in from all over the country about the things that are, the things that work for them, the things that work for their patients. We also keep really up to date with research, and we have our own research pipeline, because what we want to do is, is build things that work and build things that help families. And and so there's a lot of research that underpins everything that we've designed, which is super exciting because a lot of the time in the app space, there's a lot of things that have been built, but they're not built by clinicians and they're not built by people who understand sort of the challenges that are faced by families. So we really wanted to make yarn a little bit different to some of the things that might be out there.
So how does that kind of work? So you've got a smart device, iOS at the moment, I think coming to Android very, very soon.
Yeah, coming to Android very soon, but just in the Apple App Store for now. And with your iPad or your iPhone, no matter what you use with your child, every day you log into our app and we give you three different activities. And so there'll be a game for you to play with your child that will help you promote language. There's also a story or a nursery rhyme, which is something that we call a language stimulation activity. And what we do is we teach you kind of the ways that we as clinicians or teachers or librarians read and interact with children to show sort of the ways that you can sort of promote language learning. And then finally, we have what we call a daily activity. And so, you know, moms and dads out there are putting their kids in the car or it's bath time or it's something that they're already doing. And what we do is we say, look, as a speech pathologist, while you're doing that thing you're already doing, can you also add this little tip or trick here? And so we try and get families to just use the skills that we would use in the clinic, but be able to do it at home.
But bath time, can that kind of be good as well because it's a bit of a distraction or because it's kind of blended in with another activity? Is that kind of, uh, a bit more quote unquote, easy to do?
Yeah. I think what we really want to do is not add homework to families, right? I think families are busy and they're running around and they're chasing little people, and it's quite exhausting. And so what we didn't want to do was build a program that makes you sit down and feel like you're doing homework with a two year old, because we both know that that won't work.
It doesn't work with 22 or 40 2 or 52 year olds.
100%. That's not how anyone learns.
Or.
Does. And so what we wanted to do was more teach you things to integrate into your own routine so that it doesn't even feel like you're doing homework, but you're actually helping your child at the same time.
And I guess, you know, kind of builds on the relationship between the person and the child as well. It's kind of a bit of a different sort of a way of bonding.
It sure does. And I think, you know, I've been talking a lot about parents and running with children, but we've had grandparents who yes, we've had childcare centers that have been trying this out. So there's definitely it's not that it needs to be a parent and that that really close relationship. It can kind of be anyone in the circle of a child who can really support their language without program.
Yeah. I think in your meeting you talked about kids from from 0 to 3. So you said often it can be pretty difficult to diagnose at zero. But I guess you're kind of saying this can kind of come into the picture as early as you like.
Yeah, like communication is a core milestone for children. Our product doesn't necessarily have to be for those children that are a bit worried and maybe are showing signs of being late talkers or having a few little errors. What we do is we teach you how to best support your child's communication at any point. And so realistically, you could use it with a child who, if you just want to get your child going and really meet those milestones. But at the same time, it's definitely built, as I mentioned before, with that evidence behind us, to specifically support children who maybe have a little bit later to talk than their peers. Maybe the other kids in mom's group are chatting away and yours is a little bit quieter. Um, they're the kids and the families that we really want to get moving and.
Help so great for kids, particularly in rural areas or people who are on the waiting list. What about if you're seeing a speech pathologist? Can this be kind of complementary to that anyway?
Yeah, we've actually got a lot of speech paths who helped us build this program, who've been referring their children, who are already in with them as the sort of homework program to do while you're at home. So what we don't do is we don't replace the clinician in regards to the assessment and that really important face to face with children who have deeply complex needs. We totally recognize that speech has do an amazing job in that space, but what we aim to do is almost like complement them, where a special tool in their tool kit that they can use. And so families who are seeing a speech path can use this to just keep moving at home with something that's a lot of fun and a little bit more engaging than maybe doing a worksheet.
So I guess to the point that we touched on earlier regarding the stress that maybe speech pathologists might be on, and particularly in remote areas, it might actually help them as well, because perhaps when they get to see these people, they're kind of a bit more progressive than might otherwise been the case, and not so much. Their workload is less, but I guess there is efficacy, if you like, can be better.
That's exactly what we aimed to do. So it's 100% about how do we support the clinicians who are supporting these families. And what they need is a series of tools that lets them track and see how families are going. And so, Jan, and the way that we've built it means that if you put a family on this while they're on the wait list, when they get into you. Firstly, they know what speech pathology is and how we interact with it. So you can kind of skip all that sort of getting to getting to explain what we do. We can just get straight into the face to face stuff, but also we track how the child is going during the time, so you can see the areas that maybe they need a little bit more help in and prioritize how you help them in the clinic in that space.
That's such a great point, because I've not had a child that goes through this sort of thing. But you can imagine and obviously speaking to speaking to people who might, you know, you're sort of trying to get head around so many things. And as you say, even why are we here? Or how is this going to work if you've got a little bit of a head start, if you like? Well, that that's kind of kind of just to break the ice.
Exactly. And I think it's great that you haven't had any kids who've had to go through this. But 1 in 4 Australian parents are worried about the communication of their kids, which is a lot of children. And so just getting them going, getting that ball moving, making parents feel like they're they're helping their child when that's exactly what they're trying to do. We just give them the tools to be able to feel more empowered to do that.
Yeah, we'll let people know in a second how they can go about accessing the app. What about in terms of feedback so far? How long has it been out? And I guess you've kind of had a bit of a period where you've kind of beta tested it or, uh, you know, before it coming to market to fully fledged.
We sure did. So we ran our pilot program across winter last year. And so we had families from all across Australia who had late talking children who were stuck on the wait list and didn't know what to do. And so we rolled out a little pilot version of our app with those families to get that really important feedback of what's working and what's not working. And one fun little feature we actually built in due to parent feedback was, as we know, and we're very conscious that screen time is something that we want to restrict. We don't.
Want.
It forever. But we had one child in our pilot who really, really enjoyed one of our games. And so he was often asking to play this game and the mum said it's great. But like sometimes I want to stop him and I don't have to get out in the middle. And I said, okay, great. And so what we built is a parental lock. And so now what happens is as a parent you can set a time limit. So maybe you can say, I only want my child to be on here for five minutes while we're doing morning tea. And so what happens is it comes up and it says oops, it's broken. And you can go to your. Oh, no. Like it's broken and we can get the screen away. Um, but what we write is we say we get parents to, um, we'll say, um, please write in numbers. The number. I don't know, 72. And then they have to put in that number. But we know kids won't be able to read that to do that. Um, and so you can keep going if you want. But at the same time, it gives you that sneaky out as a parent that maybe you're looking for.
Rebecca, we're going around Australia and around the world on the Vision Australia radio network. Now everyone knows about that. So all those kids who are between 0 and 3 are really intelligent listening to this program. They're going to they're going to twig to that and that they've got you. But you have to find out a fix to that now.
No, no, I'm gonna have to figure out how to teach them to read and talk.
Oh that's fantastic. Well, um, how can people find out more? And is this kind of, uh, I would ask is also in the second when Android's coming out, but is this kind of a finished product or is it a sort of a live document always being improved upon?
I think we're always looking to improve on our platform. Um, but one thing that we're really adamant about is, is we're building in a sustainable way. So not only is it not just one and done, we update with evidence. So if new evidence comes out, this is the new way to help children in this space. We will change our app. And that's a big thing that we're really conscious of is our company is making sure we're always up to date with what's going on in the space, so that what we're providing is evidence based. But it's also the first step in what we hope is quite a long journey. So as we mentioned, we're building in 0 to 3 at the moment. But our next plan and and we might have already started. But that's a quiet thing is building in that 3 to 5 space. And so our plan is to keep building things that kids need across Australia.
Well, no one's listening. So no one heard that. Rebecca. So you say, how can people find out more? And any idea when Android might be available to.
Yeah. So if you want to download our app on the Apple App Store at the moment, um, just search in the search bar yarn speech and we'll pop up there. Otherwise, we're on traditional social media. You can find us on Instagram at Yarn Speech or on our website at one speech. And we're hoping that our Android should be out in early March, so it's not too far away. Our tech guys are working incredibly hard to make sure it looks beautiful and it all works. Um, and it should be out soon.
So yarn speech. Why are in speech and yarn speech com just.com, isn't it just com? Rebecca. It's been a delight. Certainly sounds like you're very motivated, very inspiring. And, uh. Well, good on you for coming up with a sort of an interim fix to this, uh, four year wait problem. I mean, I think, uh, there might be a few other professions looking to do a similar sort of thing, but you'll go in first. That's the most important thing. Like, we'll talk to you and maybe we can catch up with you again in the future.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's Rebecca Keeley. They're the person behind the speech. Speech pathologist saw a problem for you. Wait. Well, here's something that can tide you over and hopefully make a huge difference.