Taking the Clinic to the Streets: Gail Whitelaw on Running a 90-Year-Old University Speech and Hearing Program

Gail Whitelaw knew she wanted to be an audiologist at age 11. She met one, made up her mind, and never looked back. Twenty-five years into directing the Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic at Ohio State University, she's still in love with the work.

Her clinic is one of the oldest in the country, approaching 90 years of service. But longevity alone isn't what makes Ohio State's program stand out. It's the deliberate push to take clinical education beyond the clinic walls, into communities where the need is greatest and the learning is richest.

Why the Funding Model Matters More Than You Think

About five years before this interview, Ohio State's college made a decision that reshaped their clinic. They moved from a fee-for-service model to having much of the clinic's work underwritten by the college. The conditions were simple: pursue two goals and only two goals. Exemplary education for graduate students. Exceptional patient care.

That shift changed everything. The clinic sits in a suburban, upper-middle-class area. When revenue drove the model, the patient population reflected the neighborhood. When the college removed that pressure, diversity followed. Students started seeing the range of patients they'd actually encounter in real practice.

Some people push back on this model. "Your students don't get billing and coding experience," they'll say. Whitelaw doesn't dodge it. She acknowledges the tradeoff and points out that billing concepts are still covered in coursework, including CPT codes and ICD-10. But she believes the emphasis should be on preparing professionals for a world that looks different than it did 20 years ago.

Community Partnerships That Change How Students Think

Ohio State doesn't wait for patients to find their clinic. They go to them. The program partners with Early Head Start to screen hearing in children between six weeks and three years old, working alongside roughly 200 other organizations. They send clinicians to a school in the Mennonite Amish part of the state where many children have never received speech therapy services. Their preschool literacy initiative has raised money and tracked real outcomes.

Whitelaw is blunt about why this matters beyond clinical hours. When students go into these communities, they learn things no textbook covers. They see what poverty looks like. They hear from parents whose children have undetected hearing loss and who've been turned away by providers because of stereotypes about Medicaid patients.

"One of the frustrations I've always had is when clinic directors say, 'We don't take Medicaid because those poor people never show up.' I think that's a terrible model for us to give to our students."

That's a direct challenge to a real pattern in the field. And it's the kind of perspective that shapes clinicians who actually serve their communities once they graduate.

The Documentation Transition Is Real

Even at a program with 90 years of history, the shift to electronic medical records is still happening. Ohio State's clinic was, by Whitelaw's own admission, "old school" when it came to documentation. They tried Typhon for a while and found it didn't fit their workflow. Speech pathology adopted the Calypso system for student feedback with good results. Audiology stuck with hands-on, paper-based documentation feedback.

But cost and administrative burden finally pushed them toward making the switch. It's a reminder that even well-resourced university clinics face the same practical pressures every practice does. The tools have to match the workflow, or they become one more thing to work around.

Student feedback on documentation happens constantly. In audiology, Whitelaw describes walking-and-talking debriefs at the end of each day: what went well, what didn't, what would you change. Five minutes. Consistent. Built into the rhythm of the clinic day, not bolted on as an afterthought.

COVID Forced the Future Forward

This episode was recorded in April 2020, right in the thick of shutdown decisions. Ohio State's president, a physician with SARS-era experience, moved early. Ohio's governor shut things down at the beginning of March, well ahead of many states.

The pivot to telepractice was immediate and messy. Whitelaw is honest about the limitations. Not every client is a good fit for teletherapy. A young child who's never done it before isn't going to suddenly thrive on a screen. Students living in rural areas had spotty internet. Families had other children at home creating distractions. And accreditation bodies hadn't yet clarified how telepractice hours would count.

But she's also optimistic. She predicted that HIPAA restrictions on telepractice would loosen, that reimbursement models would change, and that the field would come out stronger for it. "Our students will be educated in that. And we'll do things better in the long run."

The plan for reopening was cautious and staged: audiology first for in-person, speech-language pathology doing most services via telepractice, minimizing building traffic until safety protocols were solid. PPE had been ordered early. Clear-front face masks were being sourced for patients with hearing loss.

Watching Students Become Who They're Meant to Be

Ask Whitelaw what keeps her going after 25 years and the answer comes fast: watching students grow. She tells a story about an alum who graduated 12 years ago and came back to deliver a guest lecture on auditory brainstem testing. The former student prepared a five-and-a-half-hour presentation, because, as Whitelaw laughed, "some things never change." But what had changed was her confidence, her competence, her depth of knowledge.

She tells another story about a client in the AAC clinic who wanted to order at Starbucks by herself instead of having her mom do it. The clinicians and Dr. Amy Sontag arranged the outing. The client used her device to order. The photos showed a young woman lit up with pride. The students who made that happen will carry that moment for their entire careers.

"There is nothing better than communication. What we do is the heart of what humans are about."

That's not a slogan. That's 25 years of showing up, building something, and refusing to let a clinic become a bubble.

University clinics juggle student supervision, patient care, and documentation every single day. ClinicNote is an EMR built for university clinics and private practices, handling scheduling, documentation, and billing so your team can focus on education and outcomes. See how ClinicNote works.

Transcript

Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats. Clinic Chats is a multidisciplinary therapy podcast that was created for students, professionals, clinic directors, and supervisors. Clinic Chats is bridging the gap between graduate programs and professionals, sharing personal journeys of the smallest of private practice startups, large and expanding practices, as well as university clinic triumphs and tribulations. We hope you'll find our podcast informative and helpful in your career endeavors. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, an electronic medical record company for private practice and university clinics. ClinicNote was designed to make scheduling, documentation, report writing, and billing effective, efficient, and HIPAA compliant.

Kadie: Today we have our second university faculty podcast. Her name is Dr. Gail Whitelaw from Ohio State University. Hi, Gail.

Gail: Hi, Kadie. How are you?

Kadie: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for joining me today out of your busy, busy schedule. I know it's a hectic time.

Gail: Indeed.

Kadie: So I wanted to start out by maybe getting a brief overview about yourself, what your profession started out as, and what your role at the university is.

Gail: Sure. I'm a unique individual because I knew I wanted to be an audiologist from the time I was 11. I met an audiologist when I was 11 and said, this is what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. And then I realized that you could not just do audiology, but you could teach audiology. And when I found that out, that combined my love of working with patients and my love of working with students.

Gail: And then I found out that you could direct a speech and hearing clinic and have had the opportunity to do that for the past 25 years at Ohio State. I have a PhD in hearing science, and I also have a master's in hospital administration, and I use both of those skills every single day. So I feel very fortunate to have had that opportunity.

Gail: Ohio State is one of the oldest speech and hearing clinics in the country. Our clinic has been around in some form or another for almost 90 years. And we are very proud of what we get to do. We provide services to Central Ohio, to beyond Central Ohio, and we provide an exemplary clinical education to the people that come to our program. So we're very, very fortunate to have an incredible clinical program and an incredible clinic. Very fortunate.

Kadie: And, you know, backtracking to your own expertise, you do it all. I'm fortunate to have you as a podcast guest and hear about this unique experience.

Gail: I genuinely say that I'm never leaving Ohio State because nobody ever says no to me. I get to do all the things that I love. I'm so fortunate that I'm in a department of very supportive people, of faculty, of clinical faculty, just amazing people. And we have the most amazing students. I'm always so proud of what they do. And we can talk about that when we talk about COVID and how they've really stepped up to do some great things.

Kadie: So touching on the faculty and students, can you give me a brief overview of, say, course teaching faculty as well as how many clinical faculty you have and then student numbers as well in the clinic?

Gail: Sure. We aim for about 32 speech students per year, so two cohorts of 64. We aim for somewhere between 10 and 12 AUD students per year. So over the four years, we have about 48 students there. And some of that is driven by things that people don't understand. Some of that is driven by community resources that are available to us.

Gail: We have a small but mighty faculty in my mind. We have three clinical preceptors in audiology. We have six clinical preceptors in speech-language pathology. As I've been talking to more programs during the pandemic, I'm shocked at how few people we have and how much they do.

Gail: On the non-clinical faculty side of the house, and everybody works together very closely, so I don't even know how to say that. But for people who are more direct faculty, we have everything from soup to nuts. We're very, very fortunate. And if we don't have something, Columbus is a fantastic place to work as a speech pathologist or audiologist. People never want to leave here when they go to school here. So we have a lot of resources available to us that can step in and do adjunct or distance teaching for us if we really feel like we're missing out on something or we need to add something.

Gail: So I think our program is really, really well covered. In speech-language pathology, we have everything from an aphasia initiative, which is run by Jen Brello, and she does a fantastic job with that, to AAC, which is run by Dr. Amy Sontag, who does a fantastic job with that, to going out into the community.

Gail: We have a really cool thing where we have a school district out in kind of the Mennonite Amish part of the state, where a lot of the kids have never gotten speech-language services, and Nadine Whiteman provides that for them. We go out into the community to do some really neat stuff related to preschool, and our Nishla group has raised money for this preschool and doing literacy and seeing the difference that early literacy makes.

Gail: I get the opportunity to go out with Early Head Start and screen hearing in children between the ages of six weeks and three years of age in a partnership with Ohio State with about 200 other organizations. And so I think it's really amazing that we get to take our clinic out on the road. We're taking speech-language pathology and audiology to the streets, and it's just fantastic.

Kadie: That is fantastic. It really sounds like the community there, that you are very involved within the community and reaching out to the different programs. Are those contacts that you yourself have created, or has it kind of been building upon itself as the program has developed over time?

Gail: I think it's a combination of both, Kadie. We have people who reach out to us. For example, the Early Head Start contract that we have was somebody reached out to me because the man that runs it, his daughter is an audiologist and trained at Ohio State. And she said, "Oh, you should talk to Gail about that." And we fell in love with the opportunity.

Gail: And going out to Shekinah Christian School that I was mentioning, Nadine had a contact from there. Someone asked, could we see a child for speech therapy? And then they started to talk about what their needs were.

Gail: One of the things that I've seen transition in our clinic is we've really tried to look at what are the needs in the community. Because what I see is it's so much broader than teaching people about speech-language pathology and audiology. When students go, and I can talk about my own experience of going to Early Head Start, students learn about the community. They learn about community resources. They learn about need. They learn about stereotypes of people who might be lower socioeconomic status.

Gail: One of the frustrations I've always had is when clinic directors will say, "Well, we don't take Medicaid because those poor people never show up." Well, I think that's a terrible model for us to give to our students. I want them to go out and see what it's like when people are in poverty and what their priorities might be.

Gail: And this Early Head Start program in Columbus is the most phenomenal thing. And our students get to hear from parents of children with hearing loss, with undetected hearing loss, or with middle ear pathology, and how providers haven't wanted to work with them because of the stereotypes that are there. And to me, that's just as important as learning about speech-language pathology and audiology.

Kadie: It's so important, and it's really inspiring for you to say that and realize that. So of course, there is an on-site clinic, correct?

Gail: Yes.

Kadie: Like you said, though, the on-site clinic is amazing for those experiences, but it can feel a little bit like a bubble. So getting out there in the world is amazing practice for both the students and for the community.

Gail: Well, we had something happen about five years ago that changed our clinic. And people who are listening to this, some of them will say, "Oh, that's the greatest thing ever." And some of them will say, "Oh, that's a terrible thing." But it's been a great thing for us.

Gail: We went from being a fee-for-service clinic to having a lot of what we do underwritten by our college. And the reason that the college did that is they wanted us to have two goals, and only two goals. The first goal is exemplary education for our graduate students. And the second goal was exceptional patient care.

Gail: And in order to do that, they saw the need to broaden out a little bit. We're in a suburban area of Ohio State, and it's very easy to get to. It's not like on the main campus. You know, we're one of the largest universities in the country. And our clinic is easy to get to, but it's also in kind of an upper middle class to upper class area. And you don't learn a lot when you don't get a lot of diversity in your clinical populations.

Gail: So when the college changed this, it changed our model, and it changed who comes to us, and it changed the diversity that we have. And if we're going to prepare people for the 21st century, we know that our country is changing, we know that diversity is changing, we know that you can't live, like you said, in a bubble.

Gail: And I'm so incredibly grateful for our college's foresight into that. Now, a lot of people will be like, "Oh, well, your students don't get that much experience in billing and coding." Well, in our clinic, they don't, but we still teach those things in coursework, and we still make an emphasis on knowing about CPT codes, knowing about ICD-10, all of that.

Gail: However, I think we have a different emphasis now of how do you prepare professionals to go into a world that may be different than it was 20 years ago.

Kadie: After the in-house clinic, you're all looking at different externships for the students. When does that happen in your program?

Gail: For our first-year speech students, they usually, by their second semester or third semester, because we're a six-semester program on the master's level, they're usually out by summer doing things in the community. And in audiology, it's a little bit different, and usually starting second semester of their second year, they're out in the community.

Gail: And oftentimes, they'll have a day in the clinic with us at the OSU Speech-Language Hearing Clinic, and then they may be out a day or two somewhere else balancing coursework with clinical practice. Obviously, the AUD students are gone in their fourth year, and they're spread all over the country. They generally don't stay in Columbus because they want to spread their wings, and there's so many fantastic opportunities.

Gail: We have students in their second year of their MA programs who are in really fantastic sites, and sometimes four and five days a week, and we see those sites as partners with us. I always talk about clinical education as a triad, that it's the university, it's the student, and it's the placement. And the more that we're on the same page and have good communication and understand each other, fantastic.

Kadie: Absolutely. Now, are you specifically in charge of all of those things that you just spoke to, these off-site opportunities, your in-house clinic, are you overseeing the scheduling and logistics of all of that?

Gail: Oh, thank goodness, no. I do the fourth year placements for the AUD students, as well as administering the clinic and doing a lot of the fun stuff that nobody else wants to do, like deal with legal on contracts and negotiate, that kind of stuff.

Gail: But we have a person who does the placements in speech-language pathology, whose name is Amy Sontag, and Dr. Sontag is fantastic. And then Christy Goodman does the second and third year placements in audiology, and Dr. Goodman is fantastic at that and at building relationships.

Gail: And as I said earlier, I know this is repetitive, but a lot of it is relationship building, and so having time to talk to sites. Did our students come prepared? What would you have wanted differently? What worked really well for you? What kinds of things are you hoping you'll see more of in the future? We want to have time to ask those kinds of questions. And sometimes it's very informal, like catching up to a preceptor for coffee or for a happy hour, and sometimes it's very formal where we might go in and do some clinical partnering with them and some clinical teaching.

Gail: So there are a lot of opportunities there, and it would be certainly more than one person for that number of students.

Kadie: Okay. Well, that's good that you're not doing quite that much. I was very, very impressed, but it's good to have multiple people with all of these moving parts. And as far as student feedback and supervision go, I'm curious to hear about how the documentation process is taught and given feedback on. I know that's big within the clinic setting.

Gail: Sure. I think that it probably is different in speech pathology and audiology. Both are taught by, we call them in our clinic preceptors, some people call them supervisors. All of that is taught based on what you need to know, all the regulations and legislation in terms of HIPAA and using good SOAP notes and all of that. But they certainly get feedback on each and every aspect of that.

Gail: Speech pathology uses the Calypso system and has had really good success with that. We in audiology aren't using that. We're way older school. For a while we used Typhon, and it didn't really meet our needs. It's nothing against the product, it just wasn't set up the way that worked for us. And so we do a lot of hands-on documentation feedback, feedback when they're writing things.

Gail: We're just moving. We're old school in so many ways, Kadie. We're moving to electronic medical records now because of the cost and how burdensome it was to us. And we really haven't needed to do that, but we really feel like we're at a point where we do need to do it now. So as we move into that, that will definitely change the way that we do documentation.

Gail: I think that our students ask for feedback, and I think that I always hope that we have a match with what they ask for and what we're able to provide. I always talk about, in audiology, at the end of the day I'll often do a five-minute walking, talking, what went well today, what didn't go well today. Tell me about your best clinical success of the day. What was the biggest thing that wasn't successful, and what would you do differently?

Kadie: We were briefly touching on this before we began recording, just how COVID-19 has affected the clinic and the students at this time. It's really hard to avoid that conversation right now because it seems to be driving everyone's entire lives. So can you touch on the actions that the university had to take as all of this started to transpire?

Gail: Sure. The president of Ohio State is a physician, and he had a lot of experience during the SARS epidemic, that would have been like 14, 15 years ago, when he was with the California state system. And so I think Ohio State, and Ohio as a state, has been very conservative in their approach to this. Our governor shut things down the beginning of March, which is way earlier than a lot of folks.

Gail: So we moved everything to online teaching, which from a didactic perspective is a challenge in itself. But thinking about doing clinical education online presents a lot of challenges. And the things we've been looking at are gearing up to do more telepractice. And as I mentioned to you before we got started, that's a fantastic opportunity.

Gail: But from my perspective, it has a couple of limitations. One is not every client we see is great to do in telepractice. You can't just put somebody up there and say, let's do our therapy and make it work necessarily for a young child, especially if you've never had any experience with this.

Gail: The second aspect of that is the technology. One of our students is living in a pretty rural area. She moved home and she's been concerned about her internet access because it's very spotty and shoddy and it's hard enough to learn that way. Then you have people who have children at home, either people who are going to be receiving our services who have other children who may be very distracted in the therapy process, or our own clinicians who have young children who may be expected to deliver services and some of the practicalities of that, people who don't have good internet in their homes as therapy recipients.

Gail: And then we have some accreditation issues of how many of those hours we'll be able to count and how long will this go on for. I was on a call earlier today and the university that I was talking with is thinking that they may not be back until January. And that's a long time if you're in clinical education.

Gail: So that's been a challenge. Looking at cases, I will say if there's any professionals out there who want to lead a case or have an interesting case, they should contact their local university because we're looking for cases. And obviously things like Simucase and ODSIM are things that are out there.

Gail: But thinking about, hey, I might like to clinically teach, great, contact the university and set up something. And certain things you just can't do well without being hands-on. It's very hard to learn to use an audiometer, for example, without ever touching a button on it. It's very hard to serve patients who really need that face-to-face and they're not going to get that.

Gail: Or I think about people with hearing loss or people that have had a stroke or traumatic brain injury and the kinds of things that they'll experience in communicating in a world where people are going to be wearing masks, where social distancing is really an issue.

Gail: So I think COVID has really, in the end, I'm going to tell you that this is going to make us better clinicians. We are going to know more things. We're going to have more tricks up our sleeves. We're going to be so much better at telepractice than we've ever been.

Gail: And I think some rules are going to loosen up. This is my crystal ball that I have no backing for. I think that HIPAA and issues like that are not going to stand as much in the way as they have with telepractice, because that's been one of our issues at Ohio State. And when the federal government and state government are saying things like, "We can loosen up on this a little bit. You can even do telepractice from your phone." That's a positive.

Gail: But I also think that reimbursement is going to change. That telepractice has also been prohibited in a lot of places, or prohibitive in a lot of places because you can't bill for it. And I think we're going to see some changes in that. We're going to see that it is effective. And that for many people, it may be preferable. It may be a better model.

Gail: So our students will be educated in that. And we'll do things better on the long run. I think on the short run, we've still got a tough road to hoe, for sure.

Kadie: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Like you said, they're going to be so well-versed in navigating different resources online for treatment with teletherapy. But I can't imagine the way that they must feel as these roadblocks have come up that they never could have predicted a year ago as they're looking at graduation for this May. Has there been any specific students who are still limited on hours before graduation?

Gail: We have been pretty fortunate with our students who are graduating. We have two graduations for the MA students. Some graduate in spring, and some graduate in summer. And right now, all of those students seem to be in line to be moving forward.

Gail: In audiology, I just did the hours for all of our fourth years. And they all are graduating. We're really competency-based, not hour-based. But they have all the competencies they need, even though some of their sites ended as early as a month ago. So they're all set for graduation for spring.

Gail: I'm concerned about the next class, and as is every student, and as is every preceptor, and as is every university, in terms of being able to get the competencies they need by this time next year.

Gail: And some of our students are asking questions like, should I take a break? Should I drop out for a semester and try to find a job? And the other part of this, the financial part of it that concerns me, is many of the jobs that our students have outside of school, like being a server in a restaurant, or a bartender, those jobs aren't available right now. Most of those people are furloughed. And our students are worried about student loans and what that's going to mean. And some of those things are totally unknown at this point in time.

Gail: So if a program is going to be extended, our university has told us that they don't want any roadblocks being put up for students, because we still want students to be able to have a really great shot at being able to graduate on time.

Gail: That's a really difficult question as a clinical educator, because we know that we want people to graduate on time and get those needs met. But we can't unleash students in the world who aren't prepared to work with patients and aren't prepared to be one of our colleagues. And so it's a real challenge. And I think we evaluate this about once every four or five days, of where are we, how are things going.

Gail: And we've also heard from a lot of our external sites, a lot of our practicums, that some of their places aren't going to open up again quickly, or they've had so much turmoil they don't know how they take a student, or they might not open up again at all. And that's really, that might be the heartbreaking truth when we get to the end of all of this, about what happens to small businesses and what happens to access to the services that we know patients so desperately need.

Kadie: So concerning. And I know there's really no answers at this time, but it's worth talking about, because I know all university faculty are probably feeling the same way.

Gail: And our plan at this point in time, I just looked at an email from my department chair before I came on. And we had set back our opening date to May 6. And based on where our building is right now, based on where the state of Ohio is right now, based on where the university is right now, I'm not thinking May 6 is reasonable. We might be able to move to June 1.

Gail: But with that June 1 opening, it's going to be a soft opening. And it depends on us having all the PPE that we need for our students, and for patients, and for us. We were very fortunate. We had a lot of foresight, and we ordered a lot of stuff before we closed. And so we're pretty good on things like CaviCide, and viral wipes, and that kind of stuff. We're working on getting face masks that are clear in the front, available to us for patients with hearing loss.

Gail: And our plan right now is for audiology to participate in the soft opening first, and for speech-language pathology to do most of their services by telepractice. Because the less people we have in the building, until we get a handle on all of this, we want safety to drive everything that we do.

Gail: And so we're very fortunate that we have a building that's easily accessible. Like I said before, it's suburban. It's not even on main campus. So patients can park in a parking lot that we pay for. They can park for free there. They can come into our building safely. We can control a lot of access.

Gail: But those are things that are huge, huge questions. I've been on probably 20 Zoom meetings with people who are clinic directors across the country. And the stuff that I'm mentioning now that we're talking about is everybody's concern. How do you protect students?

Gail: And the thing is, we talked about diversity before. We have a lot of patients, a lot of faculty, and a lot of students who may be immunocompromised. And how do we protect them? And there's a lot that I think is good about this. Infection control procedures in every clinic are going to improve. Maybe the flu season will be better in the future. I hope that's the case. That would be a positive after all of this.

Gail: I was on this meeting before and was with a director of health for the county who serves on a board with me. And he was saying that now the thing that health directors are getting is that they think that November might be a resurgence. And so what do you do with that as a world, as people needing to go back to work, as universities? It's all very challenging. And we know this is just the beginning. It's not the end.

Kadie: Exactly. Switching gears a little bit, I did want to ask you, I found that you are a co-author of a book. I wanted to allow you to expand upon that and give us some insight.

Gail: Sure. I'm a co-author of a book that's about hearing and deafness that is really designed for people who might be more on the layperson side or undergraduate side. And I was asked to co-author this book by one of our patients, who's a faculty member at Ohio State.

Gail: And he's the biggest delight. He doesn't mind that I say that he's one of our patients. I'm not following HIPAA when I say that. He introduces people to me and goes, "This is my audiologist." And then he'll say, "Kind of," because he got a cochlear implant or cochlear implants recently.

Gail: But yeah, it's fun to get to write a book with somebody who's a fun writer. And he was a lot of fun and taught me a lot about not writing boring books because I've got book chapters and other books. And I think those are awesome. I'll read them and I'm like, "Oh man, this is going to put you to sleep."

Gail: And working with Peter Paul, with my collaborator, he was a lot of fun to write with and is creative and smart and challenging. And so that was a really fun experience because to get to be with somebody who teaches you a different style of doing something and challenges you to think outside of the academic box, just fantastic.

Kadie: Oh, it's amazing. And then before we wrap things up, I wanted you to just have the chance to tell me anything else about your favorite aspects of your job, favorite thing about being part of the education system for students, not only in regards to content knowledge, but just in general, what you can take away from it and your favorite aspects of it.

Gail: Watching students grow from really neophyte people who are afraid to do treatment and think they don't know anything to mature professionals is such an incredible gift. And I think that's what drives so many of us who are in clinical education.

Gail: Last Wednesday, I had asked one of our alums to do a talk on tips and tricks to do auditory brainstem testing. Because I think our students get a lot of that, but they don't get a lot of the subtleties of it. So I asked her to do it and she graduated 12 years ago. And I sat in awe listening to her.

Gail: Of course, first of all, she prepared a five and a half hour lecture. And I laughed because she was, as a graduate student, she was over the top OCD about everything. And she jokingly said to me, and I said, "Well, some things never change."

Gail: What had changed about her was her confidence, her competence, her knowledge. I was just blown away. And to watch people grow into who they were meant to be and to be able to contribute to that is so significant. I take a lot of pride in the people that we graduate, as does everybody at Ohio State.

Gail: I always tell them that Ohio State's colors are scarlet and gray. And I tell them they're in the long scarlet and gray line, they become part of our family. And to watch people take their education and make such a difference in our society, it is just the greatest thing ever.

Gail: I think we're so fortunate. I really like Millennials. I think they have great questions. I think they're creative. They have a vision that was different than the vision I had as a baby boomer and I love the way they think about things and I love the way they ask questions and share.

Gail: And to see those successes where they have a client who comes in and they treat them that day and then you see them in the clinic office afterwards and they're just exploding with enthusiasm. One of our clients in our AAC clinic wanted to go and order something at Starbucks. Her mom was always ordering for her. And our clinicians worked with her and Dr. Sontag who runs the AAC clinic, they arranged the day for her to go to Starbucks and she used her device to order.

Gail: And it's the photographs of this young woman just lit up. She was lit up. But to hear our students, this is something they will never, ever forget. And it will change the way they practice speech pathology.

Gail: And I'm so proud of the fact that one of the other things that happened during COVID, our aphasia initiative, our students took the initiative on their own to go out to our clients' homes and draw things on the sidewalk, like chalk drawings, saying how much they miss them and dropping little things off for them.

Gail: Those are the things that I think will make a difference. And when they look back on this, the joy that you can bring. And I think that speech pathology and audiology are both so underestimated in what we do. Because there is nothing better than communication. Having physical movement, I'm on an interdisciplinary team with 11 different disciplines on a federal training grant and I love what they do. But what we do is the heart of what humans are about. It's about communication.

Gail: And so when you get to see those kinds of opportunities and you get to open those up for graduate students and for families, it is the most fantastic thing. So I love what I get to do.

Kadie: Yeah, so many aspects about it. I mean, I could go on for hours. That's amazing to hear and I love to hear it from your perspective.

Kadie: Well, I so appreciate you taking the time to do this. I'm excited to get this out and released for everyone to hear. So once again, just thank you for your input to our podcast.

Gail: Oh, thank you for inviting me. This was fun. Thank you.

Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats. If you have a moment, please leave a five-star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me, Kadie, at clinicnote.com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote.com.