March 2026
Dear registrants,
For health professions, including the professions of audiology and speech-language pathology, practitioners’ ability to provide quality health services depends on the quality of the health information available to them. Not only is high-quality health data required to be able to provide accurate diagnosis and effective treatment, but it is also needed to help a health professional decide when a referral to another professional is required and to inform health system innovation and quality improvements.
Currently, audiologists and SLPs in Alberta may routinely encounter challenges accessing health data about their patients that is required to provide safe and effective care (e.g., exposure to ototoxic medications, history of aspiration pneumonia, previous hearing and communication diagnoses in Alberta or another province). These issues may be particularly pronounced for registrants working in education and private for profit and not-for-profit contexts. Furthermore, SLPs and audiologists working in all contexts may struggle to ensure that other members of their patient’s care team, like pediatricians, nurse practitioners or otolaryngologists, have easy and timely access to important information SLPs and audiologists have documented about their shared patient’s communication, hearing, swallowing and vestibular health.
ACSLPA and the other Alberta healthcare profession regulators have recognized the daily challenges health data access and quality issues cause for our registrants and the harm to the Alberta public that results. In response, the Alberta Federation of Regulated Health Professions, in collaboration with Networked Health Alberta, has developed a Consensus Statement on Health Data and Professional Regulation. I invite you to take a look at the consensus statement and to reach out with your thoughts and concerns about these issues and how they impact you and the quality of services provided to Albertans.
Warm regards,
Melanie
Melanie Sicotte, R.SLP
Registrar/CEO