Turning Waiting Time Into Action: Lessons From a Recent Australian Co-Design Study

A brilliant new Australian study published in BMC Health Services Research by Melvin et al. (2026) titled “Turning waiting time to action: co-designing solutions to support families waiting for appointments in an Australian metropolitan child development service” highlights systemic shifts occurring across the allied health landscape. While this specific research focused broadly on a metropolitan public child development service, the findings reflect challenges currently felt across the paediatric speech pathology sector. Long wait times are a widespread issue internationally and locally, but this study shifted the narrative by bringing parents, clinicians, and researchers together to co-design tangible solutions for families while they wait (Melvin et al., 2026). Cue us celebrating in the Yarn office!

Rather than viewing the waitlist as dead time, the study emphasised the concept of active waiting. By surveying 450 parents and collaborating deeply with families and staff, the researchers prioritised strategies that empower parents to take positive steps at home, ensuring no developmental time is lost (Melvin et al., 2026). This is exciting because this is exactly what Yarn is all about, co-designing solutions directly with parents and families, and making them an active part of the solution rather than passive bystanders in a broken system.

What Families Can Do While Waiting

If you are a parent navigating a long waitlist for paediatric services, the research confirms that your everyday home environment holds immense therapeutic power. Families can take a proactive approach by focusing on the following steps (Melvin et al., 2026):

• Seek Trustworthy Digital Resources: Look for evidence-based platforms, guidelines, or structured activities that provide reliable developmental advice rather than relying on unverified internet searches.

• Maximise Everyday Routines: Recognise that language learning does not require a clinical setting. Everyday moments like grocery shopping, bath time, and sharing meals are optimal windows to model rich language, ask open-ended questions, and practice conversational turn-taking.

• Document and Track Progress: Keep a simple log of your child’s communication milestones, challenges, and successes. This documentation becomes an invaluable tool when your initial clinic appointment arrives.

How Clinicians Can Support Families on the Waitlist

For clinicians and service providers, managing a growing waitlist can feel overwhelming, but the study highlights that regular communication and empowerment can significantly reduce parental anxiety and build self-efficacy (Melvin et al., 2026). Clinicians can better support their waitlisted families through these approaches:

• Check In and Reassure: Establish a system for regular, brief touchpoints or automated communications to assure families they have not been forgotten by the service.

• Provide clear, accessible action plans: Demystify the system so families understand what to expect from future sessions, and give them practical tasks they can safely implement immediately.

• Prescribe trusted clinical tools: Introduce families to digital solutions that support active waiting.
  

Yarn is designed precisely around this philosophy of active waiting. We believe in giving families purposeful, evidence-based activities to implement at home, while giving clinicians a trustworthy, high-quality clinical tool to provide to families the moment they enter the referral pipeline. By equipping families with structured guidance from day one, clinicians can confidently bridge the service gap, transforming wait times into a period of collaborative language development. A huge congratulations to Katelyn Melvin and her team on this great piece of research.

References

Melvin, K., Smith, H., Dunstan, K., Balfour-Ogilvy, J., Benham, C., Olsen, J., O'Keefe, A., Burn, N., Aitchison, D., Ware, D., Folbigg, S., Scarinci, N., & Armstrong, R. (2026). Turning waiting time to action: co-designing solutions to support families waiting for appointments in an Australian metropolitan child development service. BMC Health Services Research, 26(1), 803. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-14503-4