Abstract:

Introduction:
The paper aims to present the accessibility of telepractice in the Czech Republic in a speech therapy context. The global pandemic situation of COVID-19 has brought dramatic changes in many aspects of clients' lives with specific needs. It also significantly affected the provision of special education care not only in the Czech Republic. Due to the pandemic, many speech therapists have realized the potential of telepractice services.

Methodology:
The research aims to determine how accessible it is for speech therapists and clients with communication disorder telepractice, not only in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The research includes an analysis of the accessibility of distance speech therapy care for speech therapists compared to the provision of routine speech therapy care and an analysis of the incidence of communication disorders / specific needs within telepractice. This research's initial questionnaire was the non-standardized questionnaire by Fong, Tsai, and Yiu (2020). They were interested in the details of the provision of distance logistics services in Hong Kong and examined the extent to which telepractice benefited from the global COVID-19 pandemic. Our research takes the structure and individual questions of the Chinese research but is reworded to best suit Czech conditions.

Results:
The established assumption was refuted that Czech speech therapists had the same experience with providing distance therapy in the past (ie, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is evident. It greatly supported the development of telepractice, changed the idea of ​​its provision, and thus forced experts in the Czech environment to test its possibilities of information and communication technologies in their field. Another assumption that telepractice equals the provision of direct speech therapy services has also been refuted. Even though technologies bring many benefits, many respondents agreed on the characteristic phenomena that make distance learning more difficult. Respondents were widely informed that unfavorable conditions arise mainly due to an unstable internet connection, poor audio, and video transmission. The lack of physical contact, which respondents consider to be essential in the field of speech therapy, was also identified as a disadvantage. A pleasant surprise was the refutation of the hypothesis comparing the experience with telepractice by Czech and Chinese speech therapists. In the Czech environment, speech therapists had more experience with the provision of remote speech therapy services, although the Chinese environment is one of the more space-consuming, and it was assumed that this fact would contribute to more frequent telepractice by Chinese respondents. Thanks to quantitative research, the assertion was confirmed that Speech Sound Disorders are significantly more operated in the provision of distance speech therapy services than the diagnosis of aphasia. Based on the study results by Fong, Tsai, Yiu (2020), the author assumed that the interest of Czech speech therapists in further training on the issue of telepractice would be the same as for speech therapists in the Chinese environment. Czech speech therapists stated that they are not interested in training mainly due to the time and disadvantage of the chosen therapy when reporting insurance companies' actions and thus prefer the typical provision of speech therapy services.

Keywords:

Telepractice, Telemedicine, Speech Therapy Distance Services, Telehealth, Video conferencing platforms.