Transcript of
Speech and language therapy
My name's Michelle Morris and I'm a speech and language therapist
and I work for Salford Primary Care Trust.
Speech and language communication difficulties,
we put the three together because these are three really important parts
of the work that we do.
They range from... We can see very, very young babies
right the way through to older people.
Communication difficulties can happen to anybody at any time in their lives.
Have a seat here.
Speech is, for us, about the sounds that people produce
and language is about both what people understand
of the language that they hear around them
and also the language that they use to express themselves.
So you can have problems in all those different areas
and sometimes you can have multiple problems.
What we would find with children, for example,
is that some children might develop speech and language more slowly
and they are not keeping up with their peers.
- This is the oldest dog. - OK.
When a child is referred into speech and language therapy,
we look at all aspects of that child's development
in relation to their communication.
So we would look at their ability to listen and attend to sound,
we'd look at their speech sounds,
we'd look at how much the child understood
in terms of the language that's used around them.
We'd look at what language they were using themselves
in terms of the vocabulary and the grammatical constructions.
If a child has a very minor problem,
then it may be that with a few sessions the problem will be resolved,
but some children have very complex communication difficulties
that will go on all their lives
and they will need interventions, not continuously, necessarily,
but at certain key points in their life.
I think people are often surprised at the range of conditions
that speech and language therapists see.
Our title, speech and language therapy,
implies that we are talking about speech and communication skills,
but we also see people who have got feeding and swallowing difficulties.
So, for example, that can happen for a baby who's born prematurely.
They may be in a special care baby unit.
We could still be called in to support the family and the child
and with developing feeding skills.
Children with physical disabilities
can often have complex difficulties with acquiring nutrition
and we would support those children.
Similarly with adults,
as a result of a stroke people can lose the ability
to chew and swallow normally
and will then require support where they haven't needed it previously.
So with this one here you can say, "The boy is tall."
We can see very complex medical disorders
like cleft lip and palate
or various chromosomal syndromes,
and we can support people
with communication difficulties in those areas.
Or alternatively it could be something like a stammer.
People easily identify stammering
and many children go through a stage
of normal developmental non-fluency
and parents can get very anxious about their child appearing to stammer.
Those children are usually referred very quickly into the service
and we would support the family with those children
rather than the child themselves
until we've established whether he's going to continue to be a stammerer
or if it's just a developmental phase the child is going through.
Adults can have what we would usually call
acquired communication difficulties,
and those can be as a result of things like a stroke
or a neurological condition like multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy
or as a result of a head injury.
Communication skills are absolutely essential to life.
They completely underpin everything that people do
and in fact they underpin it so much that people take them for granted.
We can't always cure problems
and I think that's a really important message.
So if some people have very long-standing problems
or have very severe acquired difficulties,
we can't cure everything,
but what we can do is support people
to maximise, to make the best use of the communication skills that they've got.
