Caitlin Wright is a seasoned speech pathologist (SP) at Bendigo Health with 13 years of service caring for people in the hospital, in outpatient clinics and out in the region. She is happy to say she is still learning, and in the recent climate of innovation and change in the health sector, Caitlin had the opportunity to be the first speech pathologist to be trained in endoscopy at Bendigo Health.
“I had amazing support from our respiratory medicine colleagues to help me physically train to be able to safely and confidently complete the scoping procedure with a patient” said Caitlin.
Endoscopy is a procedure using a small camera on the end of a very small tube. Speech pathologists can use this to look at the inside of a person’s throat in real time to assess their swallowing using real camera images.
Caitlin, who today works in a team of around 25 speech pathologists and supervises SPs and placement students, admitted difficulty in knowing what career to pursue when she was choosing university courses. At the time, there was only one speech pathology course offered in Victoria.
Yet over a decade on from landing her first eight-month contract role with Bendigo Health, she is still here.
Caitlin sees many patients, from teenagers to 100-year-olds, who need help with eating and drinking, swallowing, and broader aspects of communication. “It can range from being able to think of words, put thoughts together and access language, put it into context and have a conversation to how you make the [speech] sounds, having a healthy voice and being able to project yourself clearly and be understood,” she said.
Caitlin has always felt encouraged to spread her wings and try every opportunity available, be that inside the hospital or in the region as a community-based allied health professional.
“I’ve rotated through a lot of different departments within speech pathology at Bendigo Health, from home visiting to working with kids and families for their developmental side of speech [and language], inpatient rehabilitation, nursing homes and research roles,” she said.
“Early in my career I also worked towards being able to do a videofluoroscopic swallowing study, or video fluoroscopy. It’s an x-ray to watch the swallowing activity in real time which gives us a lot of information about someone’s swallowing function, [which] helps us to then treat that issue and help it to get better.
“I continue to use videofluoroscopy every week with patients and that’s something I do a lot in the specialist outpatient clinic that I work in,” she said.
There’s also a very small but very high needs cohort of people in the community who have had a laryngectomy (part or whole removal of the larynx – or voice box), which Caitlin said has helped further propel her expertise in the field.
“We help people to swallow safely and to communicate without a voice box, and manage the equipment and care needs after surgery,” she said.
In clinical education, Caitlin also gets a sense of being her best self at work by teaching and giving back to future generations of SPs who come to Bendigo Health as part of their university placement.
“I see third year and final year placement students who can finally set foot inside a hospital. It can be quite exciting and quite confronting as these students really get the context of what a SP can do.
“It’s always great to see and support someone through that first experience and when they have got past that initial nerve-wracking placement experience, it’s the deeper learning and really applying your knowledge and growing your skills - that’s also really rewarding,” she said.
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