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

PURPOSE: 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. METHOD: 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. RESULT: 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). CONCLUSION: 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.