Streamlining care coordination for students with specific learning disabilities: Identifying barriers and effective...

Students with a specific learning disability, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia, interact with many care providers in school and community settings; however, a streamlined approach to collaborative care is often absent. In this narrative review, we aim to identify barriers and solutions to coordinated care for students with specific learning disabilities.

Using an ecological systems framework, we characterise the barriers to team collaboration at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Focusing on one team member, the speech-language pathologist, we describe existing solutions designed to streamline team member coordination and identify gaps in the literature.

We summarise barriers at the micro- (lack of time, communication, preparation), meso- (financial, linguistic, and cultural differences; lack of community training), and macro- (discrepancies across levels of government, limited translation of research to practice) levels, as well as solutions to these barriers (e.g. pre-professional interdisciplinary training, community hubs, 'team approach' to translational science).

Barriers and solutions have been largely studied in a dyadic and programmatic manner, with limited consideration of scaling solutions for multi-professional interactions across the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. We conclude by proposing a novel framework with practical implications for bridging across these levels to improve outcomes for students with specific learning disabilities.