Last week we featured the work of Dr Catherine Adams, one of our speakers at the ASLTIP conference in March. This week, the spotlight is on another of our workshop presenters, Katy James. Katy is an ASLTIP member and a co-author of The Strands of Speech and Language Therapy.
Communicating Quality 3 describes the role of the SLT in aphasia as:
“Meeting the needs of individuals with aphasia in maximising their potential for recovery of language, and in developing effective conversation strategies that can be used by both the individual and those they converse with, thereby maintaining their ability to influence their environment, maintain social relationships and quality of life.”
The speech and language therapy team at The Wolfson Neurorehabilitation Centre reviewed their cases and it was found that within SLT input there were consistent themes and principles for how those themes were approached. “We envisaged each area of input as a ‘strand’ of therapy, almost like colours woven into a scarf”.
This programme is captured in a book published by Speechmark (http://www.speechmark.net/shop/strands-speech-language-therapy). It is written by the team of speech and language therapists from The Wolfson Neurorehabilitation Centre including Katy James and is intended for practitioners working with patients who have acquired communication disorders resulting from brain injury: aphasia, cognitive-communication disorder, dysarthria, apraxia.
The authors believe that a therapeutic programme should have its foundations in the linguistic, non-verbal, neurological and neuropsychological perspective of the patient’s difficulties. The approach the team has developed consists of several different strands of therapy, with each strand representing an element of the rehabilitation process:
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Assessment
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Goal planning
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Specific individualised treatment
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Education
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Friends and family
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Psychosocial adjustment
In her workshop at the ASLTIP conference, Katy James will outline how each one relates to therapy, and give some practical ideas of how practitioners might work within them. To find out more about the conference and the timetable follow this link http://www.helpwithtalking.com/resources/events/41
