Animal Assisted Speech Pathology Services
- Vani Gupta
- Feb 5
- 2 min read
I have been providing animal assisted services/animal assisted therapy for a number of years. (The current best practice terminology keeps changing, it's also been called animal assisted intervention). Recently, I’ve seen more enquiries from Speech Language Pathologists (both in Australia and overseas) who are interested in having a therapy dog at work. As you may already be aware, I have a beautiful therapy labradoodle named Poppy who comes to work with me for select clients who have requested her involvement in speech therapy.
1️⃣ My first comment to SLPs is always that the SLP needs to be trained more than the dog. In Australia at least, there's no formal accreditation - so although companies provide 'trained therapy dogs', not all dogs have a temperament suited to therapy.
‼️ Basic things to consider include client preferences and safety, animal wellbeing, goal-specific inclusion of therapy animals in SLP, hygiene, risk and insurance, and OF COURSE adhering to evidence based practice as much as possible 🔬
🪜As a very first step, I would recommend a course on canine communication. There's some great stuff to learn about this, and SLPs are uniquely positioned to understand it. So this forms the foundation of all the animal-assisted services I provide.
🛜 There aren't many SLP-specific courses to my knowledge, but I linked up with local providers (OTs and Psychs) for clinical mentoring/peer support, and attended several AAT courses and conferences.
🖇️ Links & Resources First stop for anyone considering providing Animal Assisted Services is https://aas-int.org.
Second stop: these documents contain a code of ethics and code of conduct, as well as references to other resources - https://animaltherapies.org.au/download-documents/ (I was involved in writing the Minimum Competencies for Clinicians document)
Additional links to conferences, information, and training:
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