235. Retaining School Health Professionals with Lesley Slaughter

Lesley Slaughter’s job as Senior Vice President of Soliant is to examine how to close the gap between the number of healthcare professionals and the increasing number of patients requiring care. Recently she has been focusing on school settings as the location of care and health professionals like speech pathologists, sign language interpreters, special ed teachers, etc.According to a survey conducted by Soliant, 50% of these school-based professionals were considering leaving their field altogether. At the same time, 90% of schools believe that the number of students with IEPs will continue to increase, and 26% of students will need some kind of mental or behavioral health counseling by 2028.So how do we retain these professionals in the education setting? Lesley’s research has led her to some suggestions. One is to allow professionals to remote work when appropriate. Another is to allow more professionals to be contract-based instead of district employees, allowing them more autonomy and flexibility.We dive into these solutions and discuss how we can better think about and act on this topic.To learn more, visit: pastfoundation.orgWe unbox:Causes of burnout in school-based health professionalsOngoing impacts of COVID on studentsThe importance of agility and autonomy for professionalsProduced by NOVA Media