Respectful Healthy Boundaries in Early Intervention with Natasha McNeill

Guest: Natasha McNeill, MCD, CCC-SLP - SLPs are ethically bound to practice within their area of expertise, but some often don’t and this can have drastic effects on patients. Today we invite Natasha McNeill to discuss this issue of scope of practice encroachment and hear her weigh in on how it is often early interventionists who are guilty of this. Natasha is an SLP specializing in pediatric feeding disorders and our conversation begins with a story about how she fell in love with this area of expertise. She lays out the context for our discussion next, highlighting the problem of non-licensed members of individual family service plan teams, often early interventionists, giving recommendations that are outside their roles and responsibilities. Natasha makes the important point that while this is irresponsible across the board and often steps on the toes of SLPs who play a role later in the treatment process, if an ill-informed recommendation is made about feeding treatment particularly, this can cause serious harm to the patient. We then take a deep dive into the types of things that early interventionists should be doing, while also getting into different examples of problems that can arise when they start to practice outside of their fields. Our conversation also covers the issue of lack of regulation whereby the qualifications required to become an early interventionist are too broad and there is no overarching governing body in many states. Tune in for this urgent conversation today.