Towards a definition: what does 'health promotion' mean to speech and language therapists?

Background: As UK healthcare moves towards the ideals of prevention and enablement, health promotion is more commonly cited as an area of practice. In comparison with its allied health profession peers, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, the speech and language therapy profession has little evidence to demonstrate that it has explored what its members understand health promotion to mean or how they describe their current and future practice in relation to it.

Aims: To explore how speech and language therapists define health promotion and how they describe their current and future practice in relation to it.

Methods & Procedures: Individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 community-based speech and language therapists. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using inductive coding.

Outcomes & Results: Participants viewed health promotion as a complex entity representing the processes of education and enablement in relation to responsibility for speech, language and communication skills. Participants viewed health promotion as a means of maximizing the scarce resource they represented. The vast majority of activities described as being illustrative of health promotion in a speech and language therapy context were examples of educational interventions, e.g. training, information provision. Participants believed that the speech and language therapist's role will continue to develop in relation to health promotion and that this will have implications for future workforce preparation.

Conclusions & Implications: Participants viewed health promotion as both an educational, enabling process and as a strategy that maximizes the potential of speech and language therapy resources. Further research is indicated to develop professional consensus regarding the meaning of health promotion and to support a cohesive approach to workforce development in this area.