The Munroe-Meyer Institute Speech-Language Pathology Department announced in April that it will be providing all SLP services to the Nebraska Medicine’s main campus and Bellevue Medical Center beginning July 1.
“We have always served about half of the hospital speech pathology needs,” said department director Amy Nordness, Ph.D. “We served 100 percent of the trauma consults and NICU services, and the majority of the remaining consults were randomly assigned between MMI and a second provider.”
The alternating assignments could be complicated and cumbersome at times for the doctors and nurses, who would be unsure which group was coming in to consult, who was covering on the weekends, or reaching out to the wrong group for follow-up support, Dr. Nordness said. Additionally, it created redundancy during educational and meeting times as two SLPs were always present, one from each group.
Now, MMI SLPs will be serving every single unit at the hospital, including inpatient services at the cancer center.
“The only thing we will not be involved with is outpatient head and neck cancer as ENT has their own speech language pathologist to cover those clinical needs,” Dr. Nordness said. “But we will be involved in all other clinics.”
The new contract means the department will double its hospital staff, up to 12 speech pathologists, she added.
More importantly, the contract allows the department to explore new directions to provide new services to patients.
“We’ve had great impacts on patient care with our limited involvement up to now,” Dr. Nordness said. “We’ve been providing consults and doing the best we can while trying to ‘share.’ But now that we’re going to take over the full contract, I see this as an opportunity to really develop our services even more, to be efficient, continue to provide the highest-quality care, enhance educational opportunities for Nebraska Medicine, build new collaborations, and look at new projects and development for the future that can take us even further.”
This singular contract will allow further development and expansion of services and protocols already established by the MMI Speech Pathology Department for the partial caseload they had been assigned, such as fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of the swallow (FEES) and in-line speaking valve trials. It will now allow them to explore additional projects such as standardizing a protocol for swallowing evaluations for patients who have had a lung transplant, supporting patient-provider communication, and obtaining standardized order sets for complex patients hospitalwide.
MMI Director Karoly Mirnics, M.D., Ph.D., said the new contract will begin a new era of collaboration with Nebraska Medicine.
“By growing out services, we will be better able to better serve our patient population through clinical work, education and the types of initiatives Dr. Nordness mentions. We are excited at the opportunities this new collaboration will afford us to provide high-quality and innovative care to the patients at Nebraska Medicine.”