29. Speech Therapy Reaches Far Beyond Words with Host Heidi Trusler

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Beyond Words.

It’s been a few years since I was in your ears as the Pop Family Podcast. If you’re new here, welcome. My name is Heidi Trusler and I am a speech pathologist and the founder of one of Australia’s largest telehealth speech pathology companies, Pop Family.

At Pop, we employ over 70 speech pathologists and provide over 4,000 telehealth speech pathology sessions in the average month.

Outside of work, I’m also a wife and mother to two beautiful girls. Those two girls, now three and a half and 18 months, are a solid reason why I’ve had a few years between podcast episodes, and I don’t think that needs any further explanation.

I’m going to recap Pop’s origin story today for those of you who are new here. But first, I wanted to delve into our new name and why we’ve called our podcast and community Beyond Words.

Why “Beyond Words”? The Scope of Speech Pathology

It all goes back to when I was a uni student, actually, and when I was studying speech pathology over a decade ago at UQ in Queensland, in Brisbane. People would always ask me, “Do you like your degree?” And I think this stems from a lot of people who are at university don’t actually like what they’re studying, and I don’t actually love studying, not the way that it’s presented at uni, for sure. I’m a practical, dynamic learner. I loved the practice. UQ had amazing practice that we could do, so I knew from the very beginning that I loved those. And whilst sitting in lecture theaters listening to people talk was a total bore to me, I was not stimulated by that learning model. I found the content absolutely engaging and fantastic in all other settings.

So my response to the question, “Do you like your degree?” would always surprise people. And even back then, in my late teens, I can remember saying, “If nothing else, studying speech pathology will make me a better mother.”

It was undeniable when I was 19 that studying this degree was just so fantastic for child development, and also decreasing the anxiety that you or the typical mother feels about so many things, because a lot of those things, as mothers in those early years, are to do with communication, talking to your child, communicating emotions, and feeding, eating and feeding. Gosh, food just takes up our whole lives as mothers. So I knew that back then.

But when I said, “Oh, if nothing else, it will make me a better mother,” people would get really confused and they would be like, “But don’t speech pathologists just help kids speak clearly?”

And oh my goodness, how little they knew, how little they knew then and how little they know now about the vast ripples of impact that speech pathology can stretch for children and families so far beyond words, incomes our name, Beyond Words.

I want to make sure that at Pop, what I know as a holistic speech pathologist and what my team of over 70 speech pathologists knows is available to the average mother. Why? Because I spend most days messaging a mum friend of mine, or a friend or a friend about something to do with their child. I don’t always know the answer, but I almost always have an option to point them in the right direction. And that’s what I hope to achieve at Beyond Words.

Being an excellent speech pathologist stretches so far beyond words, and I take my role in the community really seriously. I think that I have a responsibility to share what I know and what my incredible team of over 70 speech pathologists know, which is a lot. We want to share it with all the mums out there who might need it.

So it’s pretty full circle moment for me to be reflecting on how far we’ve come at Pop, and to relaunch the Pop Family podcast as Beyond Words.

The Origin Story of Pop Family

Now, how did we get here to Beyond Words? You might be thinking, “Who is this chick? What is Pop? And do I trust them?” I am there with you. So I’ll take you back to the beginning so you know our story. You know who I am, and you know where our telehealth company originated from.

So I’ll take you way back to my childhood, which is where it started for me.

I grew up in the 90s in Western Queensland. My parents had a property between Bollon and Cunnamulla, on the Narbonne Creek and I’m the third of four children. My oldest brother, Jack, was born with Down syndrome, and we lived so remotely when Jack was a baby out there. When Jack was first born, Mum and Dad didn’t have an electric, like a telephone. They had the old one-line telephone in the 80s when he was born. Which when I tell people that they think, “Well, yes, that is remote.”

So my mum not having a telephone, they certainly didn’t have access to readily access to health professionals to help them with Jack’s development. They had to travel a six-hour round trip to Toowoomba to receive disability services because the local hospitals wouldn’t see children with disabilities either.

A great, side effect of… no, not side effect, but, just, being sarcastic. Of course, obviously an awful service delivery model that only worked in metro areas and not in rural areas for kids with disabilities.

So throughout my childhood, I got to witness my mother and father act as fierce advocates for my brother and myself and my siblings in a world where there was little to no access to services for us.

We were homeschooled. We had one lesson a day via the radio. We’d tie a rubber band around it and record, or guitar lessons or choir. That was interesting. But we were homeschooled, and it was a fantastic experience. Especially because my mother was so capable as a teacher and really as the best therapist for my brother. We would ride our horses around the shed paddock every afternoon, and, it was a beautiful childhood for us, but it was difficult for Mum and Dad to access basic services for my brother and for us.

I then learned pretty early on that standing up for other people, especially my brother, was something that I was good at.

In Grade 1, we used to go into the local, school, into a day school once a fortnight and spend a day in there in school when Mum was doing jobs in town. And socially, I mean, that was pretty hard. For me, I was fine. I remember it being hard having to make and maintain friends just in one day and then a fortnight later, it was difficult to maintain those relationships. But for my brother who had a disability, obviously that would have been very difficult too. And in Grade 1, when I saw bullies pushing him around in the playground, I stormed down there and I kicked some shins. And it had the desired effect.

I remember walking back to my Grade 1 classroom, and I had actually walked out of the classroom, and I wasn’t allowed to leave. And I remember that my teacher actually smiled when she told me off, but she told me off gently, and I’m pretty sure she never told my parents.

So I learned pretty young that even though that was the wrong thing to do, it maybe wasn’t acceptable behavior to stand up for someone who needed it. Especially my big brother. And as I got older, I had kids whispering about my brother within earshot, and then I could stand up next to him and challenge them with my words. Turns out there aren’t too many bullies who are willing to go head to head in a debate when they are saying something mean.

My childhood experiences drove me to ultimately choosing a career in the service of others.

I studied speech pathology, and actually, whilst I was terrible at studying, I finally got through and I really wanted a job at a hospital desperately. And back then, hospital jobs were not easy to come by, and I actually applied for 66 jobs before I got one. When I finished university, it was all done on your academic transcript, and I spent most of my uni career working jobs, and trying to earn money, and studying. Obviously, I passed everything, but my academic transcript did not look right on an average base. So I applied for 66 jobs in almost every state and territory of Australia before I got one.

After working in a Sydney hospital for my grad year in the best job ever, I was on a maternity leave, so it sadly had to end, but I could follow patients through from stroke rehab to, day rehab to outpatient rehab. And it was a magical role at the hospital in Saint George in Sydney. I was there for a year, but after that mat leave, ended, I then was transitioned into the more acute care and the general hospital wards and doing ICU and aged care, and it really was not for me.

Basically, when you work with an adult caseload, especially in aged care, a lot of your caseload dies. And that just wasn’t for me. I really needed a job where… and I love, love, love, love children. I was a nanny for the whole of my university career. That’s what I was doing. Instead of studying, I was looking after somebody else’s kids. And I loved working with children, so I really wanted to transition out of that hospital environment. Even though it was an incredible training ground, I wanted to transition out of that.

So I started working at an Eastern Suburbs private practice, where I actually worked with mostly very wealthy families, and I was trained very well. The market in speech pathology was super competitive back then. Like I said, I had to apply for 66 jobs before I got one, and in private practice I was a contractor two years out of uni. I’m pretty sure my tax return that year was like 40 grand. I was, it was difficult. And I had to make my own way.

During my three years in the eastern suburbs, I built up my caseload and worked in amazing schools like Scotts, Ascham and basically realized the polarising difference between the quality that these kids, the quality of service and speech pathology that these kids were getting compared to the kids in my home town of Goondiwindi.

I knew that because I used to be an equestrian instructor at my local pony club. By now my family had moved to Goondiwindi and, we were heavily involved in the Yarril Creek Pony Club. And I would instruct there on school holidays, I’d take leave from work in Sydney and fly up and teach kids how to ride their ponies. And some of the mums would ask me, “Oh please, can you move home and be a speech therapist?” And they would explain the speech therapy services that they were getting. It might be once a month and it was a new grad with zero support. Or they had to drive a four-hour round trip to Toowoomba once a week or once a fortnight. Which once a fortnight was not enough for these kids. And so I thought, hang on a second, I can probably be your speech pathologist without moving home.

So my very first two clients were two kids from my local pony club, and then two little cowboys from central Queensland who heard about me and what I was doing online telehealth speech therapy through the ICPA, which is the Isolated Children’s Parents Association. My parents were at that time heavily involved in the ICPA. And it is an incredible organization that lobbies for equity in access to education and health services for children in rural and remote areas.

I saw them on the side of my day job in Sydney. I had a great boss who, would allow me to do this outside of work and on the side of my day job. When I then moved to become the paediatric speech pathologist for community health in Roma, I also had a great boss there who, would let me see my telehealth kids outside of work. So I would see my own clients before work, during my lunch break or after work, and then go and do my day job at Roma.

I had moved to Roma because my sister had had her first baby, and they were living in Roma, and I really wanted to be closer to family. Whilst I lived there, I became quite frustrated with the public system. I found that I couldn’t make the impact that I wanted to make. And there was so much red tape working in community health. Whilst it’s an amazing free service, I just wanted to do more.

So it really led me to quitting that career, and leaving my comfortable, well-paid job at Queensland Health with free accommodation. And I moved into my sister’s spare bedroom, where I had an old stepladder with this old rug on top of it as my desk and got to work. That was in 2017.

I moved to Brisbane shortly after. The reason being is that I couldn’t imagine actually training people remotely at that time, even though I wanted to do telehealth. And I thought, if I want to find speech pathologists, I’m going to have to go to where speech pathologists live. So I moved to Brisbane and employed my first ever full time employee, in January 2019. Taylor was my first ever employee and she still works at Pop today. She is a team leader and leads a team of up to 10 speechies. She’s just on maternity leave actually at the moment with her second baby girl just like me. Which is lovely.

But in the last seven years since I quit that job at Queensland Health, Pop has grown from myself as a sole trader. And then just me and Taylor. In 2019, to every two months after, Taylor started pretty much employing a new speech pathologist.

Pop Family Today and The Future of Beyond Words

So we currently employ over 70 speech pathologists. And over 65 of those are clinical. We are a speech pathologist led company. Our CEO is a speech pathologist, our founder and director myself, I’m a speech pathologist. The majority of our leadership team are speech pathologists. And many of us, almost all of us are mothers in senior leadership as well. So I think that makes us very different to some of the other companies that are out there.

The years whilst I was the CEO and also having my two babies. So from 2023 to 2022, 2023 were the hardest years of my life. Learning to juggle my two passions. My first baby technically Pop, and my work as a mother. My career as a mother, has been a difficult journey. I’m also super passionate about being a mother, and I believe that being a mother is a career. And it’s so hard. It’s harder than my other career. And I really want to do it well. And you can do it all, but you cannot do it all at once.

So last year I officially stood down from the role of CEO. And I’ve settled into my role as founder and director, promoting Kate Laherty to be Pop’s official CEO. Such a great move by me, I must say. I love working with Kate. She’s so good at all this stuff that I’m terrible at, and pretty much I get to do the fun stuff now. So arguably, well, my fun stuff, fun stuff for me, which is basically being here doing the podcast with you guys.

So here I am with a little bit more time, ready to empower our community through Beyond Words.

Recapping all of that, our story and introducing Beyond Words. I just want to say again that at Beyond Words, our goal is to empower mothers with the knowledge to make the right decisions for their family. We will talk generally about topics. This podcast will not provide medical health advice, but rather explore topics that will allow parents to choose the right path for their family. This podcast is for mothers and professionals who support mothers, and by mothers I mean mother figures. Anyone who is a primary care for making those complex health and development decisions for their family.

So subscribe to explore different topics, professional services and opinions relating to child development and motherhood. We will be hearing from experts exploring the vast and wonderful field of speech pathology, hopefully simplifying it for you guys and connecting with mums and learning from their shared experiences. Because mums know a lot.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of land, seas and waters throughout Australia and pay respect to elders past, present and future.

If you or your child are facing challenges in the areas we discussed today, please seek an individualised speech pathology assessment or chat to your GP. Take care and we’ll catch you in the next episode.