Q&A with Heather Anderson of Your Voice Speech Therapy

MONROE — After two years of running her speech pathology business, Your Voice Speech Therapy, Heather Anderson will be moving into a new location across from ProMedica Monroe Regional Hospital. The Monroe News sat down with her recently to talk about her experience in speech pathology and what brought her to start her own business.

What's your background and what brought you here?

I graduated from University of Toledo about eight years ago. I’ve always been interested in the neuro and adult medical settings when it comes to speech pathology. I started off at a Toledo hospital, I worked in their transitional care unit and then I, from time to time, would float out to their acute care. I worked on swallow studies; I did some in the x-ray type rooms, the modified varied swallow studies. And then I would float out to acute care where I saw a lot of patients on trachs, patients with traumatic brain injuries, strokes, things like that, and did the neuro and cognitive side as well, swallowing and voicing.

From there… I had always lived in Monroe, so Toledo was a bit of a hike, the drive was a little tedious, I got a little tired of it. So, I went from Toledo Hospital over to an area in Riverview, a nursing home out there and I worked there for just a couple months and then we had our son and it was still too much of a travel and too chaotic to travel.

So then I found a placement, or a position, at MediLodge of Monroe, here in Monroe, and I had interned there when I was graduate student, so I was really excited to see that open up and I worked there for about five years. I absolutely loved it. A lot of swallowing disorders, a lot of cognition, a lot of dementia care, my wheelhouse to a tee.

I caught wind of a couple girls I went to grad school with opening up their own private practices. And I thought to myself, “Eh, I don’t know if I can do that, if I’m a position to do that or anything like that.” But I took a course on it and just educated myself a little bit on what it takes, what it’s like and I found out it was something I could set for our lives and it worked out pretty good.

And now it’s like a dream come true, it’s been amazing. I started off by myself, working in one of our local libraries, just using one of the conference centers and meeting with kiddos. Then, I was able to get into the sublease I have with Gina Russel of Lightbulb Learning right now, and I’ve been operating out of one of her little offices for a couple months now. Actually, a little over that. It’s been about a year. The caseload has basically tripled and we needed a bigger space, which is a wonderful thing we have to look for. So, here we are; and I thought across the street from the hospital was ideal.

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What attracted you to speech pathology?

Funny story: When I was in high school, I considered becoming a nurse practitioner (or) something in the medical field. My mother is a nurse’s aid, she’s been in the medical field since I was a baby, so I was exposed to a lot within the medical field just hearing her stories and her experiences. I always found it really fascinating. I didn’t think nursing was quite my calling, but I knew something medical (was).

So, her and I sat down with the majors list… Wasn’t quite sure what I was interested in or what I wanted to do, and we were running through the list of majors and my mom just stopped and said “Heather, this is perfect for you.” I was like, “Okay, what is it.” She said, “Speech pathology.” And I was like, “What?” And her joke was, “You love to talk, so this is perfect for you.” (Laughter) Geez, thanks mom!

So, she was like, “I know somebody who’s fantastic, I work with somebody at the hospital". She set me up to shadow her. I spent the day shadowing her right before I graduated high school. I saw a lot of swallow studies, I saw clients with something called aphasia, which is an adult acquired language disorder, which is something else I specialize in, and a couple different neuro cases. And I absolutely fell in love with it. I also saw some voicing there which I thought was so fascinating. And it was pretty much I left that hospital that day and said, “Yep, that is 100% what I want to do.” So I chose it as my major and I never looked back.

When will this location be ready? ETA?

I’m hoping by the end of the month it has had its first round of inspections. There’s a couple light fixtures that just need to be fixed, then they’re going to walk right through again, and then I’m hoping to have the doors open then. Ideally, I was actually hoping for this upcoming Monday, but I’m waiting to get the inspection report yet, so I’m looking for by the end of the month to be open.

What’s been some of the advantages of your own private practice versus working in a hospital?

The biggest one is… working in the hospitals, working in the nursing homes and other medical settings is there’s something called “productivity,” and that can get pretty tedious. It’s a set of percentages you’re supposed to meet each day, and when you’re the only speech pathologist in the building that can be very, very challenging. There’s a lot of documentation that goes with it and it’s just not always the most practical of numbers. And we would get really hounded for that and that would get pretty exhausting. And that was something I wasn’t prepared for when I graduated. When I was an intern in my final internship, and they told us even what that was I had never even heard the word until a month before I had to graduate. And just seeing that I was like “Oh man, that’s kind of a bummer.” So, that was a big thing. I don’t hold my therapists, including myself, to a productivity standard. I believe that your quality should come from you as a therapist and your own integrity. I don’t think my therapists need to be considered a percentage. They’re more than that.

Another big change was just insurance. While I still deal with insurance it’s a bit of a different beast. I can advocate a little bit differently and a little bit more for the patients that I see now. In the other settings it can be very set in stone whether they’re going to provide for the therapy or allow them to have the services and if they’re not. So, that has been very nice as well. While I still have to call and advocate for patients, it’s a little bit more of my say and I can justify it a little more easily. It’s not quite as concrete.

So those are the big factors and other reasons were just family reasons. I have a five and two-year old at home and I want to spend as much time as I can with them. And in the medical setting you have to work; medical setting doesn’t sleep, which I knew going into it, but it gets kind of trick being scheduled on Christmas, holidays and weekends with a young family. It was exhausting and tiresome I want to be able to spend that time with my kids and also allow that for my other therapists too.

— Contact reporter Connor Veenstra at CVeenstra@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Q&A with Heather Anderson of Your Voice Speech Therapy