Journal Reviews
Take a breath between mouthfuls
Pulse oximetry provides a measure of the percentage of oxygen in the blood. The usual range of readings on pulse oximetry is 97-99%. Older people may have lower pulse oximetry readings than younger people, and young women have higher readings...
Doing it for yourself: self-management in speech and language therapy
People with stroke aphasia are traditionally discharged from speech and language therapy when they have plateaued; meaning they are making no further progress in language recovery. This service model has been problematic, leading to people being discharged when they are...
Training people with Parkinson’s disease and their partners to have better conversations
Parkinson’s disease is predominantly considered a motor disorder, impacting speech, particularly voice volume, amongst other physical functions. Language and cognitive difficulties, such as difficulties in word finding and social pragmatics are also a key feature of Parkinson’s disease. Given the...
Talking to the animals
People with communication difficulties have an increased risk of mood and anxiety disorders. This often means that speech and language therapists must actively engage in counselling as part of their intervention. It is not surprising, therefore, that the active components...
Don’t be too apologetic: disclosing communication difficulties
People who stutter are frequently considered less intelligent or less confident, and are often discriminated against. These negative perceptions have been found to differ slightly across different cultural groups. For Hebrew speakers in Israel, having a stutter can have a...
Swallowing and breathing: speech and language therapy
Swallowing difficulties are a common comorbidity in just over a quarter of people living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Given the associated risks of aspiration and exacerbation of COPD symptoms, speech and language therapists (SLTs) can offer valuable guidance...
Is it really working? Assessment versus real-life language measures
Research in the field of language treatment and rehabilitation to date has used single-word naming as a controlled measure of outcome. Yet, given people do not actually communicate in single words, there is much debate as to whether this approach...
Let the maths do the talking for word-finding difficulties
Anomia (word-finding difficulties) can arise when a person has a stroke, dementia or other neurological disorder affecting the left (typically) hemisphere of the brain. There are lots of theories underlying the process of word retrieval, many of which have not...
Risky behaviour: do care homes follow dysphagia recommendations?
A huge proportion of elderly people living in residential care homes will develop dysphagia. In Australia this is estimated at close to two thirds of all residents. It is the role of the speech and language therapist to make recommendations...
A therapeutic algorithm for tracheoesophageal periprosthetic leakage
Tracheoesophageal voice prosthesis leakage can be intravalvular (more common) or periprosthetic (focus of this study). The authors studied the causes of periprosthetic leakage among 115 patients attending for voice prosthesis management (1374 clinic attendances) treated between December 2014 to December...
Patient-reported outcome measures: what do the people say?
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) assess and quantify health outcomes from the patient’s perspective. Defining these questionnaires as outcomes indicates that they are psychometrically sensitive to change. This article describes three PROMS: namely the Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS),...
Better or barrier: what do healthcare professionals think about teletherapy?
Most healthcare professionals will have had to dabble in using some kind of telehealth platform over the last 18 months or so. And most of us will have had some reservations, or have colleagues who just weren’t sure about Zoom,...
