The SLT Sustainability network meets monthly online, and we aim to share some notes about what we discussed here on our networks page. We will share below some highlights from Novembers meeting.
In Novembers meet-up, we looked at Planetary Health Report Cards (PHRC) in more detail. One of our network members, student SLT Rachel Baker, kindly led the discussion by sharing some detail about the PHRCs. We would highly recommend reading Rachel's earlier blog post about this (See October 25th 2023 "Planetary Health Report Cards").
The discussion reflected on earlier work the network did to engage Universities and the student SLT population in discussion about curriculum content on sustainability, and on the network's conversation with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT), to learn about their action and thoughts on embedding sustainability into key governance and policy documents and SLT education. We suspect that many more students and practicing SLTs alike, would welcome more content on sustainability in student SLT courses.
The network thought about, if a PHRC were to be designed for SLT courses/ academic institutions, what we might need to consider. Overall, many of the questions posed in the PHRC would be relevant e.g. Do you [the course] offer modules on sustainable healthcare and planetary health? Are links between respiratory conditions and climate changes made? Is the relationship between food and water security and health and climate change acknowledged? This is by no means an exhaustive list of our conversation, but, we certainly felt that use of thickener and dysphagia /modified diets would be highly relevant to consider, just as a starter. Perhaps you can take some of these questions to your teams, peers, colleagues and universities to spark discussion? It certainly did for us!
The network would like to continue to explore this topic, and also look forward to having more people join the discussion at our next network meeting. We welcomed back newer and regular attendees to our network this month, but there's definitely room for more! We'll next meet in January, so please do look out for links to this network meeting, or get in touch by commenting on this blog post or emailing us: sustainable.slt@outlook.com.
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