Examining the perspectives of speech and language therapists on interprofessional collaborative practice

Interprofessional collaboration practice means that two or more professional from different fields work with patients, family/caregivers or communities to develop services and improve outcomes, to provide comprehensive, holistic services in the health or education environment, and to learn from each other. This study focused on raising awareness of collaborative work among experts and revealing the views of language and speech therapists and senior students on this topic. For this purpose, the questionnaire which prepared by American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2017 was translated into Turkish and applied to the participants. 68 language and speech therapists and 32 final year undergraduate students of the Speech and Language Therapy department participated in this study. The results were found to be behind the results of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2016 and 2017. Also, it was determined that final year undergraduate students were more satisfied with interprofessional collaboration practice teams, and graduated language and speech therapists provided more positive feedback on team participation and leadership than students. In order to extend the collaborative work among experts in our country, it should come to point and, the necessary level of awareness should be increased. Keywords: Interprofessional collaboration practice, team, teamwork