A Global View of Education in Speech-Language Pathology

The World Health Organization describes social determinants of health (SDH) as the non-medical factors, including, economic, social and political systems, that influence health outcomes. These factors shape the conditions of daily life and influence health outcomes, including affordability and availability of SLP services. Using comparisons of South Africa and the US, this poster will discuss how SDH shape the roles, practice patterns and education of SLPs in the Global South and the Global North.

Speech-language pathology (SLP) is a profession/discipline born from Western Medical ideologies. As a result, students in the profession of speech-language pathology are taught through the lens of Western medical neoliberal epistemology. This neoliberal knowledge tends to be individual, and deficit or disorder based. The interaction of the SLP has been to identify a problem(s), dysfunction (s), and disorder in communication in an individual. The primary aim of identifying a deficit/disorder has been to provide an intervention based solely on discipline knowledge, which originates in Western ideology (Held, 2019). There has been little to no acknowledgment of vulnerable and Indigenous peoples` (VIPs) knowledge, experiences, or values.

As speech-language pathologists we need to recognize our discipline’s knowledge is not neutral (Strathern, 2004). The deficit/dysfunction perspective only considers communication disorders (CD) in a vacuum. This perspective too often excludes social determinants of health (SDH) such as intermediate socioeconomic circumstances, patients’ access to providers, and possible relevant cultural exigencies, distal macroeconomic, political, and social factors that may contribute to the causes of CD (Zerai, Mupawose & Moonsamy,2023).

We argue that in educating SLPs globally we should explicitly consider the social determinants of health since they serve as predictors of the burden of disease(s) in a country (WHO). The Global North, in contrast to the Global South designate countries advanced in development and economic wealth. These distinctions suggest that the burdens of disease experienced in the Global North may differ from those experienced in the Global South. However, we assert that these same disease burdens are prevalent in the North Atlantic groups. Economic policies, social practices, and political systems contribute to health inequities across and between countries (WHO).