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Primary supervisor

Roisin McNaney

Co-supervisors


Ghana has a population of over 27 million people, of which 1 in 15 may have a communication disability. The number of speech and language therapists (SLTs) available to support these people remains remarkably small (under 20 SLTs to support the entire population), presenting a major workforce challenge. As an emerging profession, there remain significant challenges around educating the first generation of SLTs. Ghana, however, has a healthy digital infrastructure which can be taken advantage of.

Previous work has explored the issues that SLTs in Ghana face relating to therapy delivery and training and has provided extensive insights into how digital tools could support social learning and the transition from student to independent practitioner and future clinical supervisor. One area of particular importance is continued professional development, which is currently supported by a network of SLTs from the UK and Australia.

This project will explore novels innovations for SLT training in Ghana through existing technology platforms such as Zoom and Whatsapp (which are already heavily used in Ghana).  

Aim/outline

Primary Aim: 

To develop digital tools to support speech and language therapy training in Ghana

Secondary Aims:

  1. Understand how existing platforms might be adapted for use in the Ghana context 
  2. Conduct remote evaluation across the UK and Ghana 

URLs/references

https://zoomsense.io/#/scheduled

Lorraine Hudson, Clement Amponsah, Josephine Ohenewa Bampoe, Julie Marshall, Nana Akua Victoria Owusu, Khalid Hussein, Jess Linington, Zoe Banks Gross, Jane Stokes, and Róisín McNaney. 2020. Co-designing Digital Tools to Enhance Speech and Language Therapy Training in Ghana. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376474

Required knowledge

Good programming skills.