Podcasts about language therapists

The May news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, and Steve Jamieson, CEO for the RCSLT. Published 27 May 2025.In this month's news podcast RCSLT CEO joins us to talk about the 80th birthday celebrations; the Equality, Diversity and Belonging (EDB) work with members; the leadership programme; applications for new governance roles and more. Derek Munn shares some exciting wins for the profession around the UK and outlines some areas of focus for the policy team over the coming months.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

In this week's episode, Leigh Andrews from Change Communication in the UK and Lauren Gibbs from Launch Housing in Victoria, speak with Mary Woodward, SPA's Senior Advisor, Justice. Leigh and Lauren tell Mary about the benefit speech pathologists can bring when supporting people who are experiencing homelessness, and some of the resources that support their work. Lauren and Leigh speak about different types of homelessness, and how to support someone who may be experiencing homelessness. Resources:  Are you a speech pathologist working with unhoused people? We would love to hear from you: speakuppodcast@speechpathologyaustralia.org.au Launch housing: https://www.launchhousing.org.au Change Communication: https://www.chgcomm.org/ ASK IZZY – https://askizzy.org.au/ Leigh's research on communication needs amongst rough sleepers in London (open access) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1460-6984.12572?msockid=0561f54d760a6f7c277ae19677c86e7f Leigh's book: https://www.jr-press.co.uk/ The Plain English Campaign: https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/ Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists policy statement on homelessness: https://www.rcslt.org/news/new-homelessness-and-speech-language-and-communication-policy-statement-launched/ Speech Pathology Australia acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of lands, seas and waters throughout Australia, and pay respect to Elders past and present. We recognise that the health and social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are grounded in continued connection to culture, country, language and community and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. Free access to transcripts for podcast episodes are available via the SPA Learning Hub (https://learninghub.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/), you will need to sign in or create an account. For more information, please see our Bio or for further enquiries, email speakuppodcast@speechpathologyaustralia.org.au Disclaimer: © (2025) The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited. All rights reserved. Important Notice, Please read: The views expressed in this presentation and reproduced in these materials are not necessarily the views of, or endorsed by, The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited (“the Association”). The Association makes no warranty or representation in relation to the content, currency or accuracy of any of the materials comprised in this recording. The Association expressly disclaims any and all liability (including liability for negligence) in respect of use of these materials and the information contained within them. The Association recommends you seek independent professional advice prior to making any decision involving matters outlined in this recording including in any of the materials referred to or otherwise incorporated into this recording. Except as otherwise stated, copyright and all other intellectual property rights comprised in the presentation and these materials, remain the exclusive property of the Association. Except with the Association's prior written approval you must not, in whole or part, reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute, publish or electronically communicate (including by online means) this recording or any of these materials.

The  early May podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs and Ruth Sedgewick, Head of the RCSLT's Northern Ireland office.Featuring:- Language Launchpad, launching Tuesday 6 May https://www.rcslt.org/northern-ireland/language-launchpad-project/- RCSLT Northern Ireland awards - Policy and campaigns in Northern Ireland | RCSLT- General updates in Northern Ireland- What's happening around the UKThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

The March news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn. Potential impact of the scrapping of NHS England.Primary Progressive Aphasia event in Parliament and awareness today 4 April. https://www.rcslt.org/news/parliamentary-event-to-shine-a-light-on-primary-progressive-aphasia/Hopes for the Spring statement.Curriculum and assessment review published their interim findings. See more: https://www.rcslt.org/news/response-to-curriculum-and-assessment-reviews-interim-findings/Education select on SEND and white paper.Scottish rights report.Voicebox competition in Scotland – send in your joke by 1 April https://www.rcslt.org/scotland/voicebox/ This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

In this week's episode SPA's Jessica Kaplonyi speaks with Tracy Lazenby-Paterson from the National Health Service and Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists in the UK, and Dr Arlene McCurtin from the University of Limerick in Ireland, about research into thickened fluids and people living with dysphagia. They discuss misconceptions about thickened liquids as an intervention, unintended consequences, re-examining client outcomes, and alternative approaches to achieve them. Resources: McCurtin, A., Collins, L., King, L., Lazenby-Paterson, T., Lisiecka, D., Leslie, P., McInerney, M., Moran, A., O'Keefe, S., Smith, A. (2024). Beyond thickened liquids: for your consideration. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology. 26: 2. 128-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/22000259.2024.2359368 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Position paper on the use of thickened fluids in the management of people with swallowing difficulties. RCSLT Position Paper 2024. London: RCSLT, 2024. Available at: http://www.rcslt.org/members/clinical-guidance/dysphagia/thickened-fluids SPA Resources: SPA Position statement (public): The role of speech pathology in informed choice and shared decision-making in dysphagia. (Public) https://speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/resource?resource=107 SPA Practice guidelines (members only): Dysphagia https://speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/resource?resource=125 Informed choice and shared decision making with people who eat and drink with acknowledged risk: https://speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/resource?resource=521 Speech Pathology Australia acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of lands, seas and waters throughout Australia, and pay respect to Elders past and present. We recognise that the health and social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are grounded in continued connection to culture, country, language and community and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. Free access to transcripts and for a full list of resources / references for this podcast is available via the SPA Learning Hub (https://learninghub.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/), you will need to sign in or create an account. For more information, please see our Bio or for further enquiries, email speakuppodcast@speechpathologyaustralia.org.au Disclaimer: © (2025) The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited. All rights reserved. Important Notice, Please read: The views expressed in this presentation and reproduced in these materials are not necessarily the views of, or endorsed by, The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited (“the Association”). The Association makes no warranty or representation in relation to the content, currency or accuracy of any of the materials comprised in this recording. The Association expressly disclaims any and all liability (including liability for negligence) in respect of use of these materials and the information contained within them. The Association recommends you seek independent professional advice prior to making any decision involving matters outlined in this recording including in any of the materials referred to or otherwise incorporated into this recording. Except as otherwise stated, copyright and all other intellectual property rights comprised in the presentation and these materials, remain the exclusive property of the Association. Except with the Association's prior written approval you must not, in whole or part, reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute, publish or electronically communicate (including by online means) this recording or any of these materials.

The February news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn. Published 27 February 2025.We look at recent concerning news about growing waiting lists in adult community speech and language therapy in England, and also see how waiting lists compare across the UK.See statement: https://www.instagram.com/p/DGBH1T1IdnW/ Derek gives an update on key topics keeping his team busy right now and we have a look at closer look at things happening in Scotland.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

The January news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, Cara McDonagh, Director of Communications and Engagement and Pippa Cotterill, Head of Wales for the RCSLT. Published 24 January 2025.It's the RCSLT's 80th anniversary! In this podcast our guests tell you all about a launch of the birthday year which was held in the Welsh Senedd and also how you can get involved in the celebrations.www.rcslt.org/news/celebrating-t…he-rcslt-turns-80https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-wales-launch-report-at-senedd-event/ In other news:The VoiceBox 2025 competition launched on 'Blue Monday'. It's now open for primary aged children across Scotland to share their best joke: www.rcslt.org/news/voicebox-2025…nd-on-blue-monday/We are thrilled to say that the Invest in SLT petition tabled by Mikey Akers will be debated in Parliament on Monday 27 January: www.rcslt.org/news/invest-in-slt…ted-in-parliament/The Welsh Conservatives led a debate on speech and language therapy in the Senedd: https://www.senedd.tv/Meeting/Clip/1f043949-cb18-427c-b794-151b1044adc3?inPoint=03:45:32&outPoint=04:37:08This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

The December news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs. Dated 16 December 2024.Derek reflects back on 2024, looking at some of the big changes.Campaigns and how to get involved. Including Mikey Ackers' petition to Parliament which will be debated in the House of Commons on 27 January.What's happening around the nations of the UK.Useful links:Inclusive Communication in Parliament coalition:https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-joins-inclusive-parliament-coalition/Campaign on Primary Progressive Aphasia: https://www.rcslt.org/news/campaign-to-improve-care-for-people-living-with-primary-progressive-aphasia-ppa-launched/Mikey's Wish petition https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-thanks-signatories-of-mikey-akers-invest-in-slt-petition/This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT. It was produced and edited by freelance producer, Jacques Strauss.Release date:16 December 2024Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

In this, the first of our conversations around AI in speech and language therapy, we chat with Rachel Barton, speech and language therapist about her journey from AI sceptic to AI advocate. Rachel shares what she has learned and offers ideas on how others might approach AI in their work. Rachel also advises on areas of caution and talks about her pledge for responsible generative AI use in speech and language therapy.Interviewee:Rachel Barton, independent speech and language therapist and Professional Supervisor, Chatterbox Sussex Speech and Language Therapy LtdResources:Henrik Kniberg “Generative AI in a Nutshell - how to survive and thrive in the age of AI”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IK3DFHRFfwEthan Mollick “Co-Intelligence – Living and Working with AI” (2024) Penguin https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460207/co-intelligence-by-mollick-ethan/9780753560778 Jordan Wilson's daily livestream, podcast and newsletter https://www.youreverydayai.com/about-everyday-ai-podcast/ https://www.chatterboxsussex.com/blog - this has a more in-depth blog on the SERVE prompt framework as well as other blogs on WordMango, Bias, how AI might help with waiting times and the responsible AI pledge. https://www.chatterboxsussex.com/aiworkshops - more information about Rachel's AI journey and work, with a link to suggested further learning materials including podcasts, videos, websites and research articles  For RCSLT Members only: Artificial Intelligence resources: https://www.rcslt.org/members/delivering-quality-services/artificial-intelligence-resources/Integrating Generative AI in speech and language therapy: a practical guide https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/lessons/ai-in-slt/ The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

The November news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, guest starring new chair Irma Donaldson.Irma talks about what motivates her and her journey to being the chair.She describes her vision for the profession and also some of the big challenges it faces.Derek gives an update on key things which are happening right now including:- Covid Inquiry in Scotland- Mental Health Bill in England- Northern Ireland RCSLT member event attended by two ministers- Curriculum reviewVicky called for examples of ways to reduce waiting lists for children and young people's services. If you have examples for ways to reduce waiting lists for children and young people's services, or improve the waiting experience, please get in touch with Izzy Pompova (izzy.pompova@rcslt.org) or submit directly here: forms.office.com/pages/responsepa…u&route=shorturlResources:The “snowy white peaks” of the NHS: a survey of discrimination in governance and leadership and the potential impact on patient care in London and England.R. Kline, 2014 www.mdx.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_…of-the-NHS.pdf.pdf Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Vicky Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT. It was produced and edited by freelance producer, Jacques Strauss.

A group of speech and language therapists (SLTs) tell us why they believe the answer is yes. We hear about a survey of SLTs in the UK on their views of this question and find out about attitudes in Germany, Australia and wider.Interviewees:Carol Moxam, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University & Director of The Children's Speech & Language ClinicClaire D'Urban-Jackson, Dually qualified SLT with a postgraduate certificate (Level 7) in Language Literacies & Dyslexia, Knowl Hill SchoolProf. Pamela Snow, Prof. of Cognitive Psychology, La Trobe UniversitySarah-Maria Thumbeck, SLT in a rehabilitation center, research at Uni Erfurt (PhD project on looking at text level reading comprehension in persons with aphasia)Resources:• Stephenson, C., Serry, T.A. & Snow, P.C. (2023). Teachers' perspectives of the role & scope of practice of speech-language pathologists working to support literacy in the early years of school. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2023.2250934%20, Published online 2023.• Stephenson, C., Serry, T.A. & Snow, P.C. (2023). Australian speech-language pathologists' self-rated confidence, knowledge & skill on constructs essential to practising in literacy with children & adolescents. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, Published online April 28, 2023. doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2023.2202839• McLean E., Snow, P. & Serry, T. (2021). Dual-qualified teachers and speech-language therapists reflect on preparation and practice in school-based language and literacy. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(3), 249-263. doi.org/10.1177/0265659021995543• Snow, P.C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language. Positioning Speech Language Pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms, & polemics. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 18(3), 216-228. DOI: doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1112837.• pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-d…ologists.htmlLiteracy for everyday life:• Rosebrock, C. (2012). Was ist Lesekompetenz, und wie kann sie gefördert werden? [Online-Plattform für Literalität]. Leseforum.ch. www.leseforum.ch/myUploadData/fil…_3_Rosebrock.pdf• Rosebrock, C., & Nix, D. (2020). Grundlagen der Lesedidaktik und der systematischen schulischen Leseförderung (9., aktualisierte Neuauflage). Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH.• Snow, C. E. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension (Science & Technology Policy Institute (Rand Corporation), Hrsg.). Rand.Aphasia:• Parr, S. (1995). Everyday reading & writing in aphasia: Role change & the influence of pre-morbid literacy practice. Aphasiology, 9(3), Article 3. doi.org/10.1080/02687039508248197Reading comprehension for acquired brain injury and/or aphasia:• Purdy, M., Coppens, P., Madden, E. B., Mozeiko, J., Patterson, J., Wallace, S. E., & Freed, D. (2018). Reading comprehension treatment i

In October's news:-  It's five years since we launched podcasts at RCSLT. We take a look back at what's changed and stayed the same since then.- RCSLT annual awards.- Campaign to improve care for people living with Primary Progressive Aphasia: https://www.rcslt.org/news/campaign-to-improve-care-for-people-living-with-primary-progressive-aphasia-ppa-launched/- DLD Vision turns one: https://www.rcslt.org/news/dld-vision-turns-one/- AHPs Day 2024: https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-marks-ahps-day-2024/- Homelessness statement: https://www.rcslt.org/news/new-homelessness-and-speech-language-and-communication-policy-statement-launched/- A round up of what's happening around the four nations of the UK including:- Darzi review: www.rcslt.org/news/lord-darzis-n…ommunity-services/- Phonics in Wales- RCSLT Connect event coming up in Northern Ireland.- National Care Service in Scotland.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT. It was produced and edited by freelance producer, Jacques Strauss.

How do speech and language therapists collaborate effectively with parents of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)? Firstly, speech and language therapists need to understand, 'What are their needs?' In this podcast we talk with lead researcher Inge Klatte, of the Research Center for Healthy and Sustainable Living, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and one of the parents involved in this study, Astrid van Gessel, who has two children with DLD and also works at a special needs school. The paper is: Collaborative working in speech and language therapy for children with DLD—What are parents' needs?' Inge S. Klatte, Manon Bloemen, Annemieke de Groot, Tina C. Mantel, Marjolijn Ketelaar, Ellen GerritsFirst published: 16 September 2023 Useful resources:The following papers are open access.Network Collaboration for Communication: Collaboration for Communication Network | Collaboration for Communication Network | Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)Link to the paper ‘Collaborative working in speech and language therapy for children with DLD—What are parents' needs?':  Collaborative working in speech and language therapy for children with DLD—What are parents' needs? - Klatte - 2024 - International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders - Wiley Online Library Link to the systematic review I mention in the podcast: Collaboration: How does it work according to therapists and parents of young children? A systematic review - Klatte - 2024 - Child: Care, Health and Development - Wiley Online LibraryAlso see RCSLT's Developmental Language Disorder overview: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/clinical-information/developmental-language-disorder/NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In Septembers news:- Dysphagia dining event www.rcslt.org/news/people-with-d…dining-experience/- SLT voices - a new section on the website to showcase views from the world of speech and language therapy www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-launche…lt-voices-section/- 80th anniversary next year www.rcslt.org/about-us/the-rcslt-at-80/- Connect England event for members: www.rcslt.org/events/rcslt-connect-england-2024/- Voices of the future careers event www.rcslt.org/events/voices-of-t…-language-therapy/- RCSLT student to newly qualified event www.rcslt.org/events/rcslt-stude…learning-day-2024/- Influencing in Westminster and mentions of speech and language therapy in maiden speeches in Parliament.- Darzi review www.rcslt.org/news/lord-darzis-n…ommunity-services/- Evidence given at Covid 19 Inquiry www.rcslt.org/news/evidence-give…-covid-19-inquiry/- Meeting new Welsh ministers and meetings in Northern Ireland- Scottish budget and health cutsPlease do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Cara McDonagh, Director of Engagement and Communications.Release date:20 September 2024

Welcome to the Aphasia Access, Aphasia Conversations Podcast. I'm Ellen Bernstein Ellis, Director Emeritus of the Aphasia Treatment Program at Cal State East Bay in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, and a member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group.  Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration and ideas that support their aphasia care through a variety of educational materials and resources. Brief topic intro I'm today's host for an episode that will feature Dr Felicity Bright. We'll discuss her research looking at factors impacting wellbeing,  engagement and hope. Guest bio   Felicity Bright is a registered speech language therapist and associate professor in rehabilitation at Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her research examines cultures of care, and in particular, how the cultures and practices in rehabilitation respond to the needs and priorities of patients and those who support them. She has a particular interest in stroke and in the needs and experiences of those with communication impairment through her work, Felicity seeks to support practitioners services and rehabilitation organizations and to provide better person centered care. Listener Take-aways In today's episode you will: Explore how qualitative research promotes the nuanced study of meaningful clinical practice Consider cultural differences in well-being and what this might mean for how we work with people with aphasia and their support networks Reflect on the importance of having discussions with patients about hope and well-being Discuss how culture and organizations impact healthcare practice for individuals with aphasia Show notes edited for conciseness Ellen Bernstein-Ellis Felicity, welcome to our show. Thank you for agreeing to be our guest today. Felicity Bright  Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Welcome Felicity. We're going to start today with  an icebreaker question. The one you selected for today is, “Do you have  a favorite book or movie about aphasia? Felicity Bright  It was hard to choose one. Actually, I was just looking at my bookshelf and I went back to myself as a fairly new speech and language therapist quite a few years ago now. One that was really transformative for my practice was Talking about Aphasia by Suzie Parr and Sally Bing.  It's a classic, but it was a beautifully written book that really opened my eyes to the experiences of people with aphasia beyond all the technical work that we'd learned in university and so on, but it brought to life the humanity of the people who have aphasia, and really helped me rethink why I do what I do, and what the real impacts of aphasia can be for people. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Yes, that's a beautiful book that brings that all to the forefront. And I want you to say the title and author again, in case I spoke over you a moment ago, Felicity Bright The book is Talking about Aphasia and the authors are Susie Parr, Sally Bing and Sue Gilpin with Chris Ireland, Ellen Bernstein-Ellis We'll put that (i.e. citation)  into the reference list on our speaker notes. So thank you. And as we start today's interview, I was wondering if you'd like to share your path from clinician to researcher, because we've had several guests who have started in clinical work and then came to their doctoral work and research a little bit later. So,  I'd love it if you could share that with our listeners. Felicity Bright Sure. So I worked as a speech and language therapist in New Zealand. We are speech language therapists. I worked in a range of neurological settings, from acute stroke neurosurgery, did a little bit of ICU, did some rehab in inpatient services and in community, and really enjoyed that work, but I'd always had a long standing interest in research. I was a bit of a geek, you know, When I was in training, that was, that was me,  I was the geek. And so I'd always kind of expected at some point I would go down the research track. It was prompted after I had my first baby, and my work required me to either go back full time or to not work. And so at that point, I chose to not go back to work full time, and a research job came up at Auckland University of Technology, and I'd followed their work for a while. We don't do speech therapy here, it was rehabilitation research, and I was offered an opportunity to be a research officer doing interventions as part of a randomized control trial with people with traumatic brain injury. And so that kind of gave me the space to bring together some clinical work, but also some research work. It gave me the opportunity to do my Masters alongside this with my fees paid. So that was fantastic. And it really solidified for me that I was quite happy and enjoyed being in that kind of clinical research space. And so I've been in the university now for 15, nearly 16 years Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Wow, that's a great story. So now you have a 15 year old, right? Felicity Bright I have a 16 year old who is now taller than I am. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis Well, thank you for sharing that.  I'm just really looking forward to a discussion around some, what I consider critical but hard to define and challenging to research topics. like engagement, wellbeing and hope.  I want to start by asking, how did you end up researching a topic like engagement or hope? You did say during our planning meeting that you research things that you're bad at, which made me laugh. So that sounds like some courageous and reflective exploration. So maybe talk a little more about that. Felicity Bright Yeah, I am a bit of a selfish researcher. I research the things that I find tricky and a little bit hard, because for me, I want to learn how can I do better at this? How can I help my students learn how to be better in these areas? How can I help clinicians not make the mistakes that  I've made. I guess trying to be a better clinician has been at the heart of a lot of the work that I do. And you know, when I was working full time in clinical practice, I had patients who would stick with me where I just felt I let them down. They had such a short window of rehabilitation access. They were living with stroke for the rest of their lives. They maybe had eight or 12 weeks of speech therapy. There were just times when I really felt I missed the mark for them, when they didn't get the best rehab they could have had. And it was when I was working in the university in this randomized control trial of goal setting interventions after traumatic brain injury that it started to help me reflect on some of the why I was maybe having some of the challenges I was having. So in this trial, which was quite prescribed because it's a randomized control trial, I was noticing that patients seem to be engaging with these interventions a lot more than the people who I worked with in clinical practice, and that kind of surprised me a little bit. I also noticed that-- we were using Mark Ylvisaker's approach to goal setting around what  is meaningful identity based goal setting--and people were identifying hopes and goals and dreams that would have left me panicking as a speech and language therapist. What do I do about this? But it made me realize, actually, I didn't need to panic about that, and there were ways to engage with people about their hopes and dreams that honored those hopes and dreams, that kept them alive. But also, I could see ways that  I could work with this. I could bring my speech therapy hat and help people. And so it highlighted to me that maybe the things that I had perceived to be difficult or issues, didn't need to be and there were ways to think about these things differently and ways to work differently to better support people. So working on this trial, and I did some quite structured reflection around that with some of my colleagues, writing in auto ethnography around this, gave me the opportunity to reflect on these areas, but also highlighted that there was the real opportunity to do more nuanced and more detailed research that would bring to life different ways that we could support people to hold hope, to engage in rehabilitation that is meaningful and that might be able to produce some quite tangible suggestions to support clinicians and to support the people with stroke who we work with. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  I just want to say that these intangible, some what we call intangible topics that you've tackled, you always seem to end with tangible suggestions, and that's what I have found so inspiring. And we're going to circle back to hope in a few more questions. But, I just want to say, not only has my clinical thinking been informed and inspired by your research topics, but I've also just learned so much from the variety of qualitative methodologies that you've used in your work. I was wondering if you could share how you developed your expertise in qualitative research, maybe even offer some tips to people wanting to develop their own skill set. And okay, maybe I'm being a little selfish interviewer. You just said selfish researcher, but I found this challenging, and I've been trying to dip my toe, or I've fallen in head first,  trying to develop my skill set around qualitative research. What's your advice?  Felicity Bright  I was really fortunate. I came into research, into a team that had qualitative expertise and that used a variety, but not a wide variety, of different qualitative approaches. And it was a team, and still is a team, that has really high standards for methodological rigor. So to us, it's really important to do research that is robust and rigorous and that anchors back to the underpinning theory and philosophy that underlies each of the approaches that we use. But I was also really lucky in my research that I had supervisors and bosses who really supported innovation, who didn't tell me, no, this is how we do things, who didn't expect me to come into a study and do it just as they had told me to do. But they created the space for me to explore when I was working as a clinical researcher, but also as a master's and as a PhD student. Really had no issues when I said I'm going to go to the library, and I would just sit in the library and read qualitative textbooks and come back with a completely hair brained idea, but that actually turned into something that was really interesting and meaningful. So the Voice Centered Relational Approach that I've used a number of times came from sitting in the library one afternoon and just reading Feminist Research Methodology books. And I think one of my tips would be read outside speech and language therapy. There's amazing work that is happening, not just in the health disciplines or education spaces, but I love reading health sociology journals. I get notifications of a number of different journal types that alert me to different work. One of my recent projects I used Applied Tensions Analysis, which I'd never heard of, but I had a notification come across for a paper about domestic violence settings and kind of how services work. That's not in my area of research or clinical expertise, but there was something within that abstract that made me go, oh, there's an idea there that is similar to the ideas that I'm trying to get at in my stroke research. And so reading widely, I use Twitter a lot as a way of, kind of coming up to date with different research. I use trial and error. I've tried things and got them terribly wrong. I tried Grounded Theory  for about a year for my Masters, and it was atrocious. But also I found that doing research with people with aphasia pushes you to be innovative. A lot of the methodologies as they are published don't necessarily quite fit with the types of interviews or the types of data that we have, and so for me, that's provided an opportunity to test and do things differently. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis I mean, that's an inspiring response and encouraging support. So thank you. During our planning discussion, you also referred me to the Life Thread model and the 2008 article by Ellis Hill, Payne and Ward. What a wonderful article. So thank you for that. I was particularly taken with its implications for clinical practice and how it might guide us in asking questions in a better way to help us understand the social realities of our clients, to prioritize that. To understand how important the social reality is for our clients. Could you please share with our listeners some of the core concepts of the Life Thread model and how it's informed your work? Because I do see the connection there. Felicity Bright  Yeah, I came across this, Carolyn Alice Hill, who developed it, I think, as part of her PhD, was a collaborator of one of my PhD supervisors, and so Cath put me onto it. But the Life Threads model is about identity. And Carolyn's work was in stroke, and she was kind of talking to how identity changes and develops over time. And the Life Threads model talks to how our lives and our identities are made up of many threads, and those threads, they can change over time. But when there's a traumatic event like a stroke, it can cause some threads to break or be frayed, and that can be really challenging. We know there's a lot of work around aphasia and identity construction and identity loss, that's come around. But also what we know is that stroke can also prompt people to think about what are the threads that they want to continue post stroke.  Maybe there are some threads, I found in my hope research, where people are saying,”I don't want to be that person anymore. That's not something that I value”, and for them, sometimes the stroke could be an opportunity to rethink what are the threads that I now want to bring into my life as I weave this new identity of somebody post stroke, but still continues threads that have come through from before the stroke. We know from the hope research that I was doing that it was often really hard for people to see these threads.  It kind of felt like there was a pre-stroke life and a post-stroke life, and that there was quite a disruption. Those threads were cut. And so for me, it prompted questions about how do our conversations as clinicians help people identify the threads that are important for them to thread through their life. What are the new threads that they want to pick up on? You know, some of the work I've done, and we will talk about this a bit later on, around life after stroke, has highlighted how actually a lot of the conversations that happen between clinicians focus around things like tasks and activities and doing things, but there isn't necessarily a lot of conversation about identity or about what is meaningful and what do people want to carry through, and how can clinicians support that? And I would say that if we can kind of tune into the threads that matter to people or that people want to matter in their lives, it gives us a chance to tailor therapy to be much more personalized, more meaningful and more engaging, and I would suggest, probably leads to better outcomes for people. What we know from quite a bit of the research, not just my research, but other work, is that people are often doing this identity work on their own, without support. And we know that it's really hard, because our identities are social and they're relational, and they occur through connection and through communication, all of these things that are disrupted by aphasia, often. And so I think the Life Threads model really prompts us to think how can we as clinicians, support people to engage in conversations about identity, and how can we overtly, really attend to supporting identity within the work that we do. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Wow, that's beautiful. And yes, I think there's been, fortunately, a growing understanding of the importance of looking at the lack of support for this identity work with us with our clients, and I can really see how the Life Threads model has played an important role in your thinking and research. I recommend our readers to the article because it has some great examples of how to maybe flex the way you ask questions to help understand the narrative better. So I think it's, a marvelous article, I just want to take a moment and let our listeners know about the fabulous interview that you did with Michael Biel on the ANCDS podcast where you discussed engagement and ways you might incorporate Goal Attainment Scaling to help our clients establish meaningful goals.  I'll put the link to that, along with the citations to all of the work we're discussing today in our show notes. That also gives me a chance to say I don't have to cover everything today, because he did a really good job on those topics. But at the end of that podcast with Michael, you highlighted what was coming next, and that was your work on wellbeing. You've been exploring, and this is a quote by you, “what does it look like to explicitly attend to holistic, long term wellbeing?” Can you discuss some of the takeaways from your 2024 article, Psychosocial Well being After Stroke in Aotearoa, New Zealand, a Qualitative Meta-synthesis with your co authors, Ibell-Roberts and Wilson. Maybe we can just start by talking about the term psychosocial wellbeing. That's an important one to understand, but it can vary depending on one's cultural context.  Just to start with that, so yeah, good luck with all of that! Felicity Bright  It's a massive question, and it's funny, I started with the term psychosocial wellbeing, and I really intentionally used the language of psychosocial to kind of move away from thinking about just psychological wellbeing, which tended to be framed more from a mood perspective. And so I really wanted to be attending to some of the emotional, and the social, and the relational elements of wellbeing. But actually, I've now dropped the psychosocial because what we found is, when we talk to our people with stroke in the community, as part of our research, that term is completely meaningless to them, but the term wellbeing is something that resonates. Wellbeing is a really, firstly, a really nebulous term, but it's also really multifaceted. And I guess the place we've come to is, we view wellbeing as kind of quite unique to an individual, but it's deeply relational, and it's influenced through connection with people, with their cultures and with their communities, and all of those areas need attention. Now, in this piece of work that you referred to, Qualitative Metasynthesis, we were looking across the literature in Aotearoa, New Zealand, when we look at all the work that's been done, looking at life after stroke, and living life after stroke, what do people say about wellbeing and that highlighted that there were a number of features. Now, one thing I want to flag is that within New Zealand, we have an indigenous population, the  Māori population of New Zealand, who have been here for centuries before Pakeha came and colonized New Zealand. And one of the things that's been really important in our work is to really make sure that we are upholding the voices of Māori, who are often either not included in research, or are involved in research that is not particularly culturally safe, or where their perspectives are kind of subsumed within the wider perspectives of the dominant Pakeha, or European culture. And so one of the things we've been really lucky to do with this is to have my colleague BJ Wilson, who was leading the Māori stream, so she engaged with our  Māori data and literature uniquely. So we upheld that in its own right. That's context, because I'm going to talk to two different ways of thinking about wellbeing, one that was general from all of the literature and one that was specific to Māori . So when we look across all of the New Zealand literature, including the  Māori literature, we kind of saw there were probably four key areas that seemed to matter for wellbeing. Having strong connections with family, with old, pre stroke friends, but also with new friends, people who had also been through stroke and had some similar experiences. The sense of self that was connected, where people had a sense of being connected to who they were before the stroke, who they are now, and have an idea of who do I want to be in the future? And there was a sense of coherence, sense of thread that went between those identities. There was, when they experienced wellbeing,  a general sense of stability in the present. So things were okay now. It didn't mean that things were perfect. Some of the literature has suggested that people have to have positive emotions if they're going to have a sense of wellbeing. But actually, this qualitative meta synthesis, and the following qualitative work we've done has suggested, no, life is never 100% positive for any of us, but it's about having a balance of, yes, maybe there are some hard times, but also there are some good times as well.  That overall, there's an equilibrium of emotions, Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Right the duality, like be able to hold the duality Felicity Bright  Absolutely and kind of be okay with it, recognize that each of them has a time and a place. People also, when there was a sense of wellbeing, had a vision for the future, kind of a sense of moving towards that. So, yes,  they were okay in the present, but they also had a sense that the present is not my future for the rest of my life. I can see a life that is meaningful and enjoyable, and I'm taking steps towards it. But when we looked at the literature from Māori, and this was the analysis led by my colleague, Bobby-Jo, it also came through ideas like whanaungatanga and ngā hono. So whanaungatanga talks to the notion of connections, and ngā hono talks to connections and kind of belonging as well. And that was a sense of connection to whānau. So that is to people's wider kinship networks, not just blood relations like a family would be, but to kinship networks who are meaningful to the person. Having a sense of connection and belonging in their community, but also to places of meaning. So not just people, but to places. We also notice an idea around ko ahau, so being connected to their identity as Māori, to their cultural identity, in a sense that their cultural identity was recognized and was valued and supported by those around them, including healthcare professionals. Ideas of mana and wairua. So mana talks to the inherent standing and value that an individual has. And we all know that in a healthcare context, actually, that can be diminished because you become a patient in the healthcare context. But actually, for wellbeing, having that mana recognized and valued and upheld was really critical. And when one's personhood is understood and respected, that also helped with the sense of wairua, I guess, the spiritual essence of the person. And finally, was the notion of rangatiratanga, which is about autonomy and control and the ability to make decisions for oneself.  We can see that while there were similarities between our  Māori and our non-Māori groups, there were also cultural differences. So for wellbeing, for Māori, had wider integrations with their sense of whānau, their family and kinship networks, and for their culture and wellbeing was unique for each whānau within the research. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  I'd like to take a moment and have you elaborate a little bit more on that concept of the relationship of whānau to wellbeing, and how the whānau may be impacted by the stroke and subsequent aphasia. So often our family and support network does not receive direct attention. And here, you're elevating it quite a bit, so maybe you could speak to that a bit more. This is really top of mind for me, because I just went to a think tank meeting and hearing the stories of the care providers saying, I'm not sure I mattered in this equation of my spouse's health care rehabilitation.It just really struck me to hear that. So please, let's talk a little bit more about those values. Felicity Bright  Yeah, absolutely, for all of the people in our wellbeing research and in the previous hope research and so on that I've done, kind of people's whānau, their family and their social connections were absolutely critical to their recovery. And what came through, when we were looking at Māori experiences, was particularly also the intergenerational aspect, like sometimes within stroke services, we might think about the partner a little bit, not always particularly well. And I'll talk to that in a minute. But actually, we could also hear within our  Māori whānau, kind of the impacts for generations above and generations below, like the disruption to relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, and how the grandparent who may have aphasia, would usually have a really critical role in passing on family knowledge, or passing on Matauranga, kind of Māori cultural knowledge. But actually, because of the way the stroke affected them, they couldn't do that and take that role on, and so that impacted not just on the relationship, but also kind of on the identity and how Māori culture could be passed on through a whānau unit. But we've also heard exactly what you talk about. Our services are focused around the person with stroke rather than their whānau, but our services are also really short term. And so what  we can see from the research is that the family and the whānau become the connectors and the supporters. They are the consistent people. They hold, usually, deep knowledge of the person that often the healthcare professional doesn't hold. And we're doing some work at the moment around communication access in stroke units.  And even in the context of really significant aphasia, we're hearing about how whānau, even though they don't know about aphasia, they don't know about communication strategies.  But because they know how to read the person, they know their non verbal communication, they are actually really powerful translators, and hold the expertise that, actually, we don't hold as Speech and Language Therapists.  But we also know that the whānau are key in helping people access supports outside the healthcare system, and they do a lot of that navigation work that they are left to do because the healthcare system doesn't do it very well. And like you say, that's really challenging when the whānau's well-being is impacted themselves, you know, but that isn't seen consistently, and it isn't acknowledged. They very quickly become the carer, rather than, this is this person's wife and they've been married for 45 years. Or this is this person's husband, and they've got three young children at home. What is this going to mean for their relationship as a couple, for their relationship as parents? And so the families are talking to us about the exhaustion and the grief and the shock and the loss.  The relief that the person is alive, but again, the duality, there is relief, but there is also distress from the way that the stroke is impacting. And so we would really be calling for much more focus on everybody's wellbeing in this context, because if the wellbeing of whānau is not there, that impacts also on the wellbeing of the person. And I think we need to be shifting how we think about who is our client, whose needs do we serve, and what is our role in supporting the social and relational context around the person Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  That's beautiful. You really highlighted that role, the role of the whānau. And you also identify, Felicity, some other key contributors to wellbeing, and then how those might really impact our clinical goal setting, and I know that's always such an important aspect of how we think as clinicians. You have to document because we're in a system, which we'll talk about. Maybe you can share some other factors that you identified. Felicity Bright  Yeah, so I would be encouraging people to think about what are all the things that seem to support people's long term wellbeing? And those are things, like the relationships they hold within their family, but also within their social networks and within their work networks and so on, Thinking about the different emotions that people might be experiencing. Thinking about hope and what supports people to hold hope, and what do people hope for. Think about the connections that matter to people, the connections to people.  The cultural things that matter for people's wellbeing.  The connections to community activities and roles and so on. And think about the things that matter and are meaningful for individuals that usually fall outside our traditional SMART goals that we use in New Zealand, you know? Is it smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound? What is it? I would be saying our goal should be focusing on what makes a good life for this person. And I would be encouraging you, if you're a clinician, looking at the goals that you're setting for the person.  Where is the good life in those goals? Is that up front and center and documented on the page that everyone can see it? That's something I learned through my goal setting research. That was my first research job, the importance of taking people's words, putting their words on a page, and keeping the words where everybody could see it. So where are the things that support wellbeing and that constitute a good life in our goal setting? Where are they in the interventions that we're doing? And I would be really encouraging people to reflect on how they are making the links explicit between the therapeutic tasks and the things that really matter to people. Because we know from the engagement work that when people can see the link between what they're doing in therapy and what matters to them in life, it is much more likely to be engaging and is much more likely to support them to persist, even when it's difficult, because they can understand this is why I'm doing this thing. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Right? Oh, that's beautiful. That really leads nicely into another 2024 article that you've put out focused on wellbeing.  And that's The physical wellbeing is our top priority: Healthcare professionals' challenges in supporting psychosocial wellbeing and stroke services. That article examines what seems to be a mismatch between knowing as clinicians that wellbeing is important, right, and being able to specifically address it within our clinical context. So, we say that we want to, and we know it's important, but the ability to get there, it's quite challenging. I was wondering if you could highlight some of your findings and key recommendations. And I think one of those actually addresses the graduate curriculum. I think that is really going back to the beginning, right? So, please share some of the wonderful work from that article. Felicity Bright So the context for this work is, this is part of a bigger program of research I'm doing around wellbeing after stroke. And this isn't specific to people with aphasia, but we do have people with aphasia in the research.  This research came from this issue-- we've got decades of literature that says that wellbeing is important. We've got a body of literature that says clinicians know wellbeing is important, but we are persistently not addressing wellbeing, and we've got decades of patient experience data that says this is an unmet need. So I was really interested in understanding, why have we got this persistent mismatch between what is known what matters and what is done, and so using an approach called institutional ethnography to try and get into the cultures and the structures that contribute to this, the rationale behind that is I didn't want to be creating solutions that were going to be completely unattainable in the healthcare context. And so I wanted to understand what's going on in the structure of the healthcare system, and how might we be able to work with that or push against that, to create different ways of thinking about how we work to deal with this persistent issue. So this project, this part of the research, we were looking at, why are clinicians not seeming to address wellbeing? And so we interviewed over 30 clinicians, I think, within this research for a whole range of healthcare disciplines. What came through really consistently was everybody wanted to support wellbeing. Everybody thought it was important, but there were a number of factors that made it difficult, and we traced as to why that was so. Firstly, we can look back to when the person first comes into the service. They come into the emergency department. There's often a code stroke that's called. It's a time of really busy early biomedical focus around investigating the stroke, doing assessments. The first couple of days are about intervening to prevent another stroke or to prevent complications. And dysphagia assessment is a classic in New Zealand. Dysphagia assessment is usually prioritized over communication assessment because it is seen to have particular risks and contribute to particular complications. And so we've got this really early biomedical focus as people come through the first few days. Then the focus shifts a little bit to assessments and treating impairment in function. And when we were interviewing clinicians, they were talking about wanting to give people the best chance of recovery, and that linked to ideas around neuroplasticity and the importance of early intervention for maximizing neuroplasticity and brain remodeling. There was a real focus on addressing the practicalities like toileting and dressing and what was needed to get people home. And there was a view often that emotions could wait. We need to do the practicalities first. We can do the other stuff later. This was a time of focusing on helping people survive, get through and get home, and it was in the context of really busy wards.  You know, sitting and watching nurses work, they are flat out. They are understaffed, and they have very limited time to be doing these aspects of work. But all of this contributes in this wider healthcare system that in New Zealand, and I suspect internationally, is short staffed, underfunded. We've got more demand than we've got beds. There is a really strong focus on getting people home. Now that's not inherently bad. A lot of our people that we speak to want to be home. Home is a more healing environment for many people than being in hospital. But when the focus is on getting people home, and that is usually about, is the person physically safe to be home, what can happen is other forms of work and other impacts of stroke can be devalued or be forgotten. And what we could see is people were doing work to support wellbeing within this, but it was kind of a particular form of wellbeing work. They would acknowledge a person's emotions, if they came up through interactions.  They would be responding to the emotional cues that people gave off that they were maybe feeling a bit uncertain or a bit upset. They talked about the importance of listening to the person, but that was often couched in a ‘I can listen for so long, but then I need to get on with my session', because the assessment, the treatment, the moving people forward wasn't important, and they would look to others to help. But the problem is, I would say this, this did a really good job of dealing with the tip of the iceberg, the emotions that were on the surface. But if we think back to what I've just said about what matters for wellbeing,  relationships, connection, sense of self, hope, those things are not addressed. What we saw was that wellbeing was other to the core work of any individual discipline. That didn't work for anybody. Didn't work for our patients that we spoke to. It didn't work for our clinicians as well, because we could also see the moral injury and the burnout that comes when you can't offer the services that you know people are wanting and needing. And when we think about what do we do about that? Well, yeah, it's tricky, and I don't have any great answers, but training and education is one thing. So when we think about wellbeing as seen as other to the core business of the disciplines, we need to look at, what is it that we're teaching our students? What are we saying is core work of speech therapy or of physiotherapy or of nursing. I've got the privilege of chairing the accreditation body for speech therapy in New Zealand, and we are rewriting our accreditation framework at the moment that essentially dictates what programs need to teach. We now have a requirement that programs are teaching about psychosocial wellbeing, and that programs are assessing students on how they're addressing psychosocial wellbeing. We need to look at how pathways for care develop, and where is wellbeing within policies, processes, structures, documentation, Basically, it's nowhere. But we also need to look structurally, and we can talk a little bit more about structures and organizations and cultures, because I think what this work reflects is a wider issue around the cultures and the organization of care that can make it really challenging for clinicians to work in the ways that they do. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Oh my gosh, it's a beautiful, beautiful response. I think my favorite quote, and there were many in that article, but the one that said “people with stroke live with the impacts of a stroke system that is designed around biomedical short term care for a lifelong condition and deserve services that support them to thrive, not just survive.” I think it's what we need to bring back into the curriculum for our students to understand. And all of this ties into the importance of understanding how cultures and organizations, like you just said, of care, might impact the therapy we provide to our clients. Why do cultures and organizations of care matter? You're alluding to that. I think we've just started to reflect on that. Felicity Bright  Yeah, I've often felt there's a real risk with the research that I do that we could end up pointing the finger at clinicians of not doing things as well as they could or as well as they should. But actually, we need to understand why is this? Why does it make sense for clinicians to prioritize dysphagia over communication? Why does it make sense to prioritize getting people home, over spending the time on addressing their wider wellbeing? And I've been really lucky to work with Deb Hersh and Stacey Attrill, we did a piece of work that looked at this in the context of how speech therapists enacted therapeutic relationships. And we started by delving into why do people work in the way that they do? We started to see the cultural elements. So the needs, for instance,  your allegiances to colleagues, to be a good team player, to maintain your legitimacy. And particularly for speech therapists, who often have a slightly tenuous role in stroke teams. Physios and OTs are important, but speech therapists often have to kind of fight to kind of have their voices heard, and so that can lead to speechies behaving in particular ways. We can also see how cultures of safety impact on what people prioritize. So Abby Foster has done some beautiful work around the cultures of aphasia care and acute care, and highlighting that actually the priority for physical safety and managing dysphagia risk is privileged over the culture of or a need to think about what is the risk associated with communication and poor communication and people not having communication access. If we understand why people work as they do, and if we understand how the cultures and the structures work, then we can start to unpack them and think about what are the ways that we might be able to do things differently. You know, these cultural factors are very real, and none of them are inherently wrong, like it's not a bad thing that we're trying to prevent people getting aspiration pneumonia. That's really, really important, but we need to understand how these things shape practice and the unintended consequences that they might have for what is not valued and for what work isn't prioritized, and what outcomes don't actually seem to really matter in these contexts. And when we start to make these visible, then that opens up space to think about, how might we be able to do things differently, where we can maybe hold all of these things. And you know, in my work that I'm doing around wellbeing, that's the next phase of our work, is working with clinicians to think about, how might we be able to do things differently, so that it's not one or the other, it's not a dichotomy.  But how do we create space for all of these things to be viewed as important and to be prioritized? Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  You've started to dig into that already, because you have yet another 2024 article that you co-authored with Kayes, Soundy and Drown,  Limited conversations about constrained futures: exploring clinician conversations about life after stroke in inpatient settings. And that examines how clinicians talk about the future with their clients. It analyzes 300 hours of observation of clinical interactions, along with 76 interviews with people with aphasia and 37 clinicians. I just want to say that's an astounding undertaking. So, as I read it, it felt like almost an extension of your 2013 and  2020 articles looking at hope, because you connected how what we say can impact how our clients see their future possibilities. Can you share some of the themes you constructed from all of that amazing data collection? I mean, I'm sorry, I thought 15 interviews were a lot, so then I saw this, and I'm like, oh my goodness, amazing. Felicity Bright  It was a pretty massive piece of work, but it was a real privilege to be able to sit and just observe interactions. And I'm so grateful to our people with stroke, many of whom were like two or three days post stroke, and they had the stranger come along and sit there and observe them for 12 hours, but also to our clinicians, who were quite vulnerable in that process of having somebody observe and analyze what they were doing. But at the same time, I think that work is really valuable for looking at what is going on. What we could see is that the conversations that were being had tended to focus on quite a short term future, and we termed this theme constrained temporal horizons. When clinicians were talking about the future, the vast majority of those conversations were about the immediate future. For doctors and nurses--for nurses, it was often what needs to happen in this shift. For allied health and for doctors, it was what needs to happen before you discharge from our service into the next service. And for some allied health, it might be the first few days at home, but there was a view that talking about the longer term future beyond that should be done by other clinicians who might have more knowledge of what life could look like at that stage. We also found that the talk about quite a constrained future was in the context of actually very limited talk, in the first place. So when we think about communication access, for instance, we think, oh, people with aphasia aren't getting very good communication. Actually, lots of people with stroke are not getting very good communication. Again, thinking about cultural factors, but actually communication is not happening well in stroke units, or, I think within the wider healthcare system.  You know, we've got a very task focused, medically focused situation. And so the conversations that were happening were on topics that were led by healthcare professionals, on the topics that they felt mattered-- the tasks they needed to do, the body structures and impairments. The goals that were set were about what needs to happen before somebody gets home. There was little talk about emotions. There was little talk about how you're feeling about what's going on, or what it might be like for you or for your family when you go home. And so this talk about the emotions and so on and future possibilities was left to patients and to families to raise. And instead, the conversations tended to focus on what the healthcare professionals saw as essential topics for the episode of care. We certainly did see some conversations about the future. So I don't want to be disparaging, and I also want to acknowledge the very partial nature of research. I did not see every single interaction. I know that a lot of these quite personal conversations often happen in things like the shower, when the nurses or the OTS are helping the person shower.  That's one of the few private spaces on the ward. And so I want to acknowledge that my analysis is based on a limited data set, and it isn't based on all the conversations that happened, but certainly there was a trend towards limited conversations. We did see that clinicians would open some doors about the future. So they would talk about possible prognosis in the context of things like upper limb prognostic testing that is offered in some hospitals in New Zealand. We would see clinicians talk about what was meaningful to people, particularly in a context where the patient was struggling to engage, but often when the clinicians were talking about this wider future in this context, it was done to try and plant seeds about what the healthcare professional thought was realistic, and it was done to try and help the person engage in rehabilitation in the context of maybe struggling to engage at the best of times. So I think what we could see was that conversations were limited. They were limited conversations about short term, constrained futures that didn't necessarily set people up with hope for the future, with a sense of possibility, with a sense of even starting that process about what matters, to thinking about what matters to me, what do I want life to look like? Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Wow, and that really just circles us back to that concept of hope. Your work in hope has just been so meaningful to me. I've been really honored to be the guest lecturer speaking about aphasia to our counseling course that's taught by Dr Shubha Kashinath at Cal State, East Bay. And I've included, from the beginning, your work on hope. I just feel it's critical to give our students ways to understand and think about this construct and the role they can have in offering some hope building clinical interactions. I'd like to close this interview by having you discuss some of your first work that I had the honor to read, and some of the hope affirming strategies that you suggest in your 2020 article. Because I just think that's really a gift. Felicity Bright  One of the things that really fascinated me in this work was how our people with aphasia in the research talked about how they look at their clinician and they are reading them to see, are you somebody who's going to give me hope or not? And if they didn't feel their clinician was going to support their hope or was going to help give them hope, or was going to disparage their hopes, they would shut down and they wouldn't share. And so I think, one of the things is to be reflecting on yourself.  What are the messages that you are giving about how you are a safe person to talk to, about whether you are somebody that they can engage in these risky conversations about? I think there's a couple of things as well. We need to recognize that just because somebody says they hope for something doesn't mean that they expect it to happen. We all have unrealistic hopes and expectations. You know,  psychologist colleagues talk to me about how actually having unrealistic hope is part of being psychologically adjusted, and why should that be different for people with stroke? Who are we to say that we hold the expertise. Now, that's not to say that there aren't challenges. So sometimes you might need to do a bit of a balance of, oh, is this something I need to engage in a conversation about? You know, an example is, if somebody is going to invest quite a bit of money in something that actually, there's no evidence to support and could potentially be problematic. There's a really good guideline I found from Christy Simpson, who's an ethicist, who talked about what are the positive effects that this hope has for people? What would be the impacts of taking it away, both positive, but also, what are the negative things that it would do? And so actually engaging in a bit of a risk analysis to think critically about what is holding this hope doing for somebody. Linked to that in the latest paper we did around recalibrating hope, it really highlighted to me the importance of trusting people to often recalibrate their own hopes. So I went back to my original participants from my 2013 research a couple of years later, and I looked at their experiences of hope over that time. And what we found was most of them recalibrated their hopes. They hoped for different things over that time, and they had done that as they engaged in different activities, as they tried things, as they considered their progress, as they rethought what mattered to them. And so that really highlighted, to me, the need to trust people, but it also highlighted the need to think about, how do we support a context that supports people to do that recalibration. Those who were more likely to recalibrate and hold both hope and realism together were people who had social networks, who were engaging in meaningful activities, and who had a sense of purpose and possibility. One of my participants didn't have that. They had lost their social connections. They had no activities in which they were engaging in what was meaningful, and their hope had shrunk. And so it talks to me again, those earlier conversations we've had about well being, thinking about what's meaningful, what supports wellbeing, that's exactly the same thing that supports hope. How are we supporting people's social wellbeing? How are we supporting their relational wellbeing? How are we helping them connect to what is meaningful and what is possible, not just to their impairments, and maybe what is not working so well. I think it's really important to be explicitly thinking about, what is it that helps people bring joy, have joy? What brings them peace in the present? And how can we help them have that sense that things are okay, even if they're not perfect, but also help them have that sense of looking to a future that's possible. Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Okay, we only have a minute or two left, but I'm going to throw this last question out to you. Felicity, if you had to pick only one thing that we need to achieve urgently as a community of providers, of professionals, what would that one thing be? This is almost like your elevator pitch. You got 60 seconds here. So, so Felicity Bright  So my one thing, in a long, complex sentence, is that speech and language therapists need to reprioritize communication and supporting people to live well after stroke and aphasia, and they need to consider how we model to our colleagues and to our patients and families, and how we support cultures of care that value relationships and relational work, that value and support communication, and that value and support wellbeing.    Ellen Bernstein-Ellis  Oh my goodness, well said, Felicity. Thank you so much for the honor of having this interview today. I know it's going to be impactful to our listeners, and I want to thank our listeners as well. For references and resources mentioned in today's show,  please see our show notes. They're available on our website@www.aphasiaaccess.org and there you can also become a member of our organization, browse our growing library of materials and find out about the Aphasia Access Academy, and if you have an idea for a future podcast episode, email us at info@aphasia access.org.  For Aphasia Access Conversations,  I'm Ellen Bernstein-Ellis, and thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access. Thank you, Felicity. Felicity Bright  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.   References and Resources AUT Centre for Person Centred Research: https://cpcr.aut.ac.nz/our-research Biel, M. (Host). (2016). An interview with Felicity Bright: The patient's engagement and experience with you, the speech pathologist (No. 2) [audio podcast episode). ANCDS. SoundCloud.https://soundcloud.com/ancds/ep-2-an-interview-with-felicity-bright-the-patients-engagement-and-experience?utm_source=www.ancds.org&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Fancds%252Fep-2-an-interview-with-felicity-bright-the-patients-engagement-and-experience  Bright, F. A., Ibell‐Roberts, C., Featherstone, K., Signal, N., Wilson, B. J., Collier, A., & Fu, V. (2024). ‘Physical well‐being is our top priority': Healthcare professionals' challenges in supporting psychosocial well‐being in stroke services. Health Expectations, 27(2), e14016. Bright, F. A., Ibell-Roberts, C., & Wilson, B. J. (2024). Psychosocial well-being after stroke in Aotearoa New Zealand: a qualitative metasynthesis. Disability and Rehabilitation, 46(10), 2000-2013. Bright, F. A., Kayes, N. M., McCann, C. M., & McPherson, K. M. (2013). Hope in people with aphasia. Aphasiology, 27(1), 41-58. Bright, F. A., McCann, C. M., & Kayes, N. M. (2020). Recalibrating hope: A longitudinal study of the experiences of people with aphasia after stroke. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 34(2), 428-435. Bright, F. A., Kayes, N. M., Soundy, A., & Drown, J. (2024). Limited conversations about constrained futures: exploring clinicians' conversations about life after stroke in inpatient settings. Brain Impairment, 25(1). Ellis-Hill, C., Payne, S., & Ward, C. (2008). Using stroke to explore the life thread model: an alternative approach to understanding rehabilitation following an acquired disability. Disability and rehabilitation, 30(2), 150-159. Foster, A., O'Halloran, R., Rose, M., & Worrall, L. (2016). “Communication is taking a back seat”: speech pathologists' perceptions of aphasia management in acute hospital settings. Aphasiology, 30(5), 585-608. Parr, S., Byng, S., & Gilpin, S. (1997). Talking about aphasia: Living with loss of language after stroke. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Simpson, C. (2004). When hope makes us vulnerable: A discussion of patient-healthcare provider interactions in the context of hope. Bioethics, 18(5), 428-447

In August's news:- Influencing into the new government in Parliament.- Update on RCSLT's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion work and plans. See also reponse to the riots across the UK: www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-respons…ots-across-the-uk/- Launch of Buddy Chat course in Northern Ireland. This is for children to learn to communicate with others who have communication issues - and is facilitated by teachers.- Changes in Welsh government.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

The Government has been accused of ‘Tokenistic engagement' by a number of medical professions on tackling issues in Children's Disability Services. The umbrella group called Health and Social Care Professions say it could have an impact on the safety of children with disability. One of the groups criticising the Government is the Irish Association of Speech & Language Therapists and their Chief Operations Officer Edel Dunphy. Edel spoke to Newstalk Breakfast this morning.

The Government has been accused of ‘Tokenistic engagement' by a number of medical professions on tackling issues in Children's Disability Services. The umbrella group called Health and Social Care Professions say it could have an impact on the safety of children with disability. One of the groups criticising the Government is the Irish Association of Speech & Language Therapists and their Chief Operations Officer Edel Dunphy. Edel spoke to Newstalk Breakfast this morning.

In July's news:- Impact of the results of the General Election and how you can get involved.- Communication Access free training www.communication-access.co.uk/- Lee Silvermann Voice Technique media coverage www.rcslt.org/news/new-study-com…e-with-parkinsons/- King's Speech- Senedd reports on the implementation of the Additional Learning Needs legislation and curriculum reform and access for disabled children in Wales to education and childcare www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-respond…ng-senedd-reports/- Scottish Covid InquiryPlease do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Peter Just, Head of External Affairs and Influencing.

In this ‘Commission Conversation' Geoff Barton, Chair of the Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England talks to Melanie Cross about the intersection of oracy and social, emotional and mental health needs. Melanie is a speech and language therapist and author with decades of experience. She developed the Mind Your Words course for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and wrote the book Language for Behaviour and Emotions. She is an expert in undetected communications needs. 

In June's news:- The UK General Election- Get involved in e-action: www.rcslt.org/policy-and-influen…on-2024/#section-4- Communication Access free training communication-access.co.uk/- Results of the Voicebox joke telling competition www.rcslt.org/news/east-lothian-…cebox-competition/- New permanent National Speech, Language and Communication Co-ordinator within Welsh Government www.rcslt.org/news/new-permanent…-welsh-government/Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

The Free Speech Union has responded to the Office for Students' (OfS) consultation on its proposed new guidance for English universities on how best to uphold academic freedom and free speech on campus. Realistically, the OfS's approach to freedom of speech is likely to be unpopular with universities and, as a result, could face legal challenge. Our response sets out why we think the OfS's position is legally defensible and how it could be improved. We also discuss the University of Cambridge's Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech, which we believe to be very positive - although the student magazine Varsity appeared less enthused. Sticking with the university world, an article in the Telegraph by an anonymous student caught our eye this week. When it comes to social media use, the writer observes that, “We aren't posting online because we think we will have a clear impact. We're doing it because of a huge moral impetus to speak out on issues - whether or not they concern us and whether or not we are familiar with them - and to be ‘right about them'”. The student continues, “The reward? A feedback loop of heart “reacts” and supportive comments, and endless approval in the form of retweets and likes”. In the follow-up discussion, Ben highlights three damaging experiments that have been carried out on our young people in recent years: trans ideology, lockdowns and smartphones. We finish with the new Appendix that we have added to our EDI Tax briefing paper. It runs through two egregious examples of EDI training, both highlighted to us by concerned FSU members. The first is a mandatory training course for any Amazon employees with supervisory responsibilities. It is produced by ‘Glamazon', the company's internal LGBT+ affinity group. The second is a guide produced by The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, a professional association, that's intended for all speech and language therapists, as well as support workers and students. ‘That's Debatable!' is edited by Jason Clift.

In May's news:- VoiceBox joke telling competition in Scotland www.rcslt.org/scotland/voicebox-2024/- Cuts to children's speech and language therapy in Aberdeen.- Working together with decision makers in Scotland to influence on future budgets.- CEO visit to Northern Ireland and update on situation there; cancer, prisons, budget challenges; SEN provision in the Assembly.- Wales: new student places; meetings with new ministers; ALN funding and First Minister Question.- Kessler report www.rcslt.org/news/new-report-on…-and-young-people/, media interest in children's waits; SEND delays; NHS budget shortfall of 5 billion; Neonatal CEN evidence to Lords on pre-term birth.Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In April's news:- The RCSLT Member survey is open now for members to have their say: www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-member-survey-2024/- There are RCSLT board and committee vacancies open now, including lay positions:www.rcslt.org/news/trustee-and-c…ee-vacancies-2024/- RCSLT will be at Birmingham Pride in with partnership with the SLT Pride Network. Participating in Birmingham Pride is an opportunity for celebration and joy, as well as an important platform to voice the inequalities that still exist for the LGBTQIA+ community.www.rcslt.org/news/join-the-rcsl…ide-in-birmingham/- The third in a series of webinars about the Professional development framework is taking place on Thursday 25 April.- Watch out for news on our upcoming RCSLT Connect events which will be around the UK.- Hear about the National Audit Office report on the NHS Workforce plan: www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-welcome…hs-workforce-plan/- RCSLT's response to separate nursing pay scale consultation www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-respons…cale-consultation/- Waiting lists in Northern Ireland and media exposure there- Parliamentary petitions:Increase investment in speech and language therapy: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/657935Review how to make Parliamentary debates inclusive of communication difference:petition.parliament.uk/petitions/658364Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Cara McDonagh, Director of Engagement and Communications at the RCSLT.

Irish pilot study sparks new hope for people with Parkinson's disease, prolonging their ability to communicate by slowing down the progression of the disease on vocal function. A HIHI pilot study of the Telea platform and app recorded a 10% increase in the voice of patients with Parkinsons As World Parkinson's Day approaches, Telea, a Cork based start-up in University College Cork (UCC) and supported by Health Innovation Hub Ireland (HIHI) offers new hope to Parkinson's patients with their innovative digital speech therapy technology. This will come as welcome news as in Ireland, there are almost 12,000 people living with Parkinsons. World Parkinson's Day Telea's innovative at home therapy platform and app provides a vital connection between Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) and patients with Parkinson's disease allowing the SLT to monitor patient progress and treat them remotely. This platform is a gamechanger for people with Parkinson's disease as it assists people to maintain their voice and slow down progression of the disease. The platform empowers people with Parkinson's Disease to proactively drive intervention by increasing the quality, quantity and consistency of treatment with high dose, timely, prescribed intervention which they can do at home. The benefits to the health system and to patients in Ireland are immeasurable. Clinically, it frees up appointments, enhances efficiency and provides remote performance analysis and biofeedback. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that primarily affects movement. The disease gradually progresses over time and is characterised by a variety of motor and non-motor symptoms, such as tremors, changes in walking patterns, stiffness, as well as difficulties with balance and speech. At present, there is no known cure for Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease worldwide with one in every 100 people over the age of 60 diagnosed. The journey of patients with Parkinson's has been well documented by Michael J. Fox actor, author and Parkinson's advocate who disclosed his diagnosis at the age of 29. Current treatments focus primarily on managing symptoms rather than addressing the underlying cause of the disease. Speech and communication difficulties are common symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Approximately, 90% of people with PD experience communication changes. Patients may develop weakened voice quality, can demonstrate impaired pitch variation and less clarity when pronouncing speech sounds. When Parkinson's disease affects a person's ability to speak, the impact on their lives can be significant. Difficulties in communication can lead to social withdrawal and isolation. Speech therapy plays a crucial role in managing symptoms and improving communication abilities in people with Parkinson's Disease and enhancing vocal strength. Therefore, the marked communication improvement emerging from the results of this newly launched HIHI pilot study of the Telea platform and app now provides fresh hope for patients with the disease. The pilot of the Telea platform was conducted with the HSE Community Health Organisation (CHO) 8 in the Midlands of Ireland working with 7 Speech and Language Therapists and 37 of their patients with Parkinson's Disease. HIHI analysed pilot results (end-user feedback, client assessments and usage data) and prepared a final project report to disseminate outcomes with stakeholders in the Midlands and other Community Health Organisations. Key findings were: the average improvement of voice was 10% across a mix of clinician-rated and patient-reported outcome measures. there was an 80% reduction in waiting times for SLT assessment and intervention for clients with PD. Over 80% said Telea had a positive impact on their voice. over 80% reported that their adherence with speech therapy exercises improved, with clients completing an average of 62 exercises per week. 100% of SLTs would recommend Tele...

  Show Notes - Episode Next STEPS: In conversation with Professor Ian Kneebone Welcome to the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. I'm Jerry Hoepner. I'm a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire and co-facilitator of the Chippewa Valley Aphasia Camp, Blugold Brain Injury Group, Mayo Brain Injury Group, and Thursday Night Poets.  I'm also a member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group. Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas that support their aphasia care through a variety of educational materials and resources. I'm today's host for an episode that will feature Professor Ian Kneebone from the University of Sydney Technology.  Biosketch: Ian Kneebone Professor and Head of Discipline (Clinical Psychology) at the Graduate School of Health at the University of Technology Sydney. He is a chief investigator at the Aphasia CRE and has led and co-facilitated much of the work on optimizing mental health and wellbeing for individuals with aphasia. His work on illuminating the stepped care model as a guide for clinicians working with individuals with stroke has helped speech-language therapists and other rehabilitation disciplines to better understand their roles in psychological care after stroke and specifically aphasia. He previously joined the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast with me for Episode #34. We're excited to have Ian joining us again, as so much work has taken place in the area of psychological and psychosocial interventions for individuals with aphasia in the past five years since that previous podcast conversation. Professor Kneebone and his colleagues have been at the center of that work, including developing and evaluating the ASK trial, the Kalmer relaxation program, collaborative goal setting, Reducing Emotional Distress in Stroke (REDS)and low intensity psychotherapeutic interventions, among others. In addition to Professor Kneebone's large-scale investigations about psychological interventions, Ian is a clinician at heart, also very engaged in hands-on clinical work, where he directly collaborates with speech-language pathologists and other disciplines. I'm privileged to discuss these topics with Ian today. Take aways: Need for psychological care for people with aphasia: People with aphasia have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other psychological needs. People with aphasia are twice as likely to be anxious or depressed as someone with a stroke without aphasia. Stepped care model provides direction: The stepped care model helps us to define scope of practice and where we fit in, based upon our level of training. It also provides guidance for psychological care that all speech-language pathologists/speech-language therapists are trained to implement. Behavioral activation: This is a direct connection to the Life Participation Approach for Aphasia (LPAA). Increasing engagement in personally relevant activities is at the heart of both approaches. Ian discusses where solution-focused brief therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy fit into the stepped care levels: With additional training, good evidence is developing for these approaches. There is a need for ongoing psychological supports in the chronic phase of recovery: Increased mood state is associated with better physical and communication outcomes AND dealing with the physical and communication issues can improve mood state. Shifting to “compensation” can make people with aphasia feel like they're not going to recover further: We need to make sure that we have conversations about those shifts so that people don't misperceive that shift as the end of progress. SLPs/SLTs need to train mental health professionals to use supported communication techniques to support their interactions: SLPs/SLTs may need training on how to teach other disciplines to support communication. People with aphasia should be involved in co-design work to address psychological interventions. From a research perspective, we need to involve people with aphasia and from an intervention standpoint, we need to involve individuals with aphasia.   Interview Transcript: Jerry Hoepner: Today, it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Ian Kneebone. In Kneebone, is professor and head of discipline in clinical psychology at the Graduate School of Health at the University of Technology Sydney. He is a chief investigator at the Aphasia care and has led and co-facilitated much of the work on optimizing mental health and wellbeing for individuals with aphasia. His work on eliminating the step care model as a guide for clinicians working with individuals with stroke has helped speech language pathologist and speech language therapist and other rehabilitation disciplines to better understand their roles in psychological care after stroke, and specifically aphasia. He previously joined the Aphasia access conversations podcast with me for episode 34. We're excited to have Ian joining us again. As so much work has been done and taken place in the area of psychological and psychosocial interventions for individuals with aphasia. In the past five years since that previous podcast conversation, Professor Kneebone and his colleagues have been at the center of that work, including developing and evaluating the Ask trial, the calmer relaxation program, the collaborative goal setting, project and low intensity psychotherapeutic interventions among others. In addition to Professor knee bones, large scale in investigations about psychological interventions, Ian is a clinician at heart, also very engaged in hands on clinical work, where he directly collaborates with speech language pathologist and other disciplines. I'm privileged to discuss these topics with Ian today. I'm excited to dig into this conversation. And I'm really interested in talking a little bit about your perspectives about kind of the intersection of speech language pathology, and psycho psychotherapeutic interventions, psychological care, those big topics in general. And I know that in our past conversations, we've discussed a little bit about just the profound need for psychosocial psychological interventions for individuals with aphasia and the kind of the lack of access to care for mental health providers, to individuals with aphasia. So maybe we can start out a little bit by just sharing your thoughts on the role of speech language pathologists in addressing communication-based psychological supports for individuals with aphasia and their families.   Ian Kneebone: Well I think the first thing is to say that the whole stroke team should take responsibility for psychosocial issues and challenges, both from a prevention point of view, but also an intervention point of view. Where there's the potential to do so. Particularly with people with aphasia, the speech pathologist, or speech language therapist's role is a real standout one. And we know frequently that this work, because of the communication problems, often falls to Speech, Language Therapists to, you know, by their own admission, feeling unprepared to do it. So, I think there's certainly the will there from speech language therapists to be involved in this work, we just need to provide the right training the right scope of practice, and to get things going. So, this this gap in services is filled. You know, you were talking about the rates of psychosocial issues, but we do know that if you've got a stroke, and you've got a phase, you're afterwards, you're twice as likely as someone with without aphasia after a stroke to be anxious or depressed and have very, very high rates. Even clinical levels of depression are common. I guess it's not surprising anyone who works in the area will know that, but it's still very sobering to restate that statistic.   Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, it sure is. Just speaks to the tremendous amount of need and, and obviously, we know the tremendous amount of unmet needs for people with aphasia and their family members as well. Just because of how we're barely scraping the surface of this issue, I think, but making some good progress in those directions, you've done some really foundational work on the Stepped Care Model for stroke and even other populations as well. How can SLPs draw upon that model as a way to help them to understand scope of practice issues, to understand where they fit and kind of guide their interventions?   Ian Kneebone: Well, I think Stepped Care has been really useful. And I've gotten great feedback on this not that I invented step care by any means. But certainly, the improving access to psychological therapies model from the UK started this off in mental health. But the opportunity is to convey and allow people to know where they can work and what's appropriate, and when they might need to refer on or co-work with, with another profession. And the Stepped Care Model really does that. So, people are able to say, Well, I'm involved in this group, it's designed to prevent things like depression and anxiety, which are very common, as we just said, and I'm able to learn these skills or apply these practices to improve outcomes and prevent this. But you know, at some point, when these levels of symptoms of such and particularly questions of risk, risk of self-harm, risk of suicide, those sorts of things, when commonly people would refer on to mental health professionals. And I think the unique ability of speech language therapists to provide supportive communication training for mental health practitioners and so on, means that the role goes beyond just prevention, and to actually intervention. But also, to say that the model where people stepped and matched to the level of care they need, means that, you know, there is a scope of practice beyond prevention for speech language therapists, and that's those therapists who choose to train in psychological practices and psychotherapies. So, we do know, for instance, there's some strong work going on at the City University in London, where they're looking at training Speech, Language Therapists in a particular sort of Solution Focused therapy, which is very well regarded as an evidence base. And that's provided by speech language therapists, with the right training and the right background, to develop the competencies and know how to manage risks, and so on. So, the Step Care Model allows people to see where they're at in terms of their scope of practice, when they're on or when, if they want to, what skills they might need to practice at a at a high level.   Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, that's really well, well explained. And that's actually a really nice segue into my next question, because I know, the Step Care Model that you presented back in 2016 identifies some specific psychological interventions. So, you talk about motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapy and a number of other approaches. I'm just interested is their kind of a plan in mind or a process in mind that will help to identify other interventions and kind of where they fall to give mental health professionals, speech language pathologists, and other disciplines, kind of a sense of where those other interventions fall. So, things like dialectical therapy and so forth?   Ian Kneebone: Well, there's a range of therapies that we've found useful for people with, with mental health problems, and obviously, it's the application of those to people with aphasia that's the point of interest. And we do now have very promising work going on cognitive behavior therapy for people with aphasia, we've just completed a case series, which is just been accepted by Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, looking at modified CBT for people with aphasia, which is really exciting. We're doing stuff on behavioral activation, which is very promising for people with aphasia and relaxation therapy, we've just completed some case series work, looking at that. And that's really exciting because that was co-designed by people with aphasia, and then then then launched based on that very solid foundation. The more interesting or the very interesting work is being done on some of these, what we call third wave Cognitive Behavior therapies, which are things like Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, for instance. And a lot of that's been leveraged off the brain, the general brain injury literature now where people like Dana Wong, who's from LaTrobe University here has done some seminal work looking at modifying for people with cognitive and communication problems, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Reg Morris from Plymouth University in the UK has done some great founding to work with some of his PhD students and looking at Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for both carers and people with aphasia after stroke, you did mention before, it's easy to focus on, of course, the client or the patient with aphasia, but you know, the need goes beyond that, because the ripple effect of the, of the impact of the communication and, you know, the disabilities that commonly come with stroke as well goes to a person's social circle and familial circle, and including those people in therapy is, is an important part of the investigation as well. Absolutely.   Jerry Hoepner: It's so common, we have partners who are socially isolated as well, just because they're the primary communication partner for that individual with aphasia, and whatever restrictions to participation, they feel, right, it's just all connected.   Ian Kneebone: When I teach my clinical students, I often say like, you no, you've got an identified person who's been referred to you, but you've got to realize that nearby, there's going to be someone who's just as anxious and depressed, if not more so. But at that point, and that we do know, there's a reciprocity between anxiety and depression, that person with aphasia, and, and a significant care person. So, it's really important to include those people in therapy if you can, but being mindful of not including it in a way that adds to the significant burden and challenges. So it's got to be done in a really appropriate way without asking people for things that they're not able to provide, because they're just coping with things like role changes, financial issues, and you know, the loss of the person as the relationship they had with them on account of communication.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. And, as you were talking about that, it makes me think about how that changes over time as well. So those initial kind of burdens, that might be a tough time for them to engage in those kinds of conversations, because like you said, they're just trying to keep their head above water and trying to make it through everything else, all those other role changes and additional roles they've taken on. But I wonder about your thoughts in the chronic phase as, as both the individual with aphasia and their partners start to make those adjustments, if maybe that's an opportunity for some of those interventions.   Ian Kneebone: Those often talk about that that phase is life after stroke. And that's usually about 12 months later, when we know pretty much how people's rehabilitation has proceeded. And people are pretty much aware of how they will be functioning on into the future. And as you say, I think there's a there's a sort of a crisis point when someone's having their stroke. And there's that kind of acute phase where people are adjusting, but the important thing at that time, people think well, my personal, my personal looking after, or I'm going to get better and so on. But it's when that realization happens. So, we find these sorts of emotional difficulties can occur early or later after, after a stroke, with or without aphasia, of course, and that, you know, it's important that people's needs be met, on into the future, the recovery phase in life after stroke. Because many people when we've done this in our qualitative interviewing and surveys by places like the Stroke Association, UK, that people often the 12 months, a lot of the care, a lot of the treatment or drops away. And then as we were talking about the feeling isolated, and well, this is all I'm going to get, and so on, people are really challenged at that time, and we need to be able to provide, you know, supports and therapies on into the future for those individuals. You know, depression, anxiety content, you know, is pretty consistent at any time after a stroke. And when we're really bad at predicting, I think, you know, who's going to be affected at what state so we're going to be going to be vigilant, and we have to be, you know, particularly vigilant, I guess, I'm probably preaching to the converted with your audience here, but that we know that people are anxious and depressed out of stroke effects, their functional outcomes, and including the communication outcomes and so on, you know, if somewhere, you know, I remember seeing someone with a with a swallowing problem and the Speech Language Service was very concerned about this. And they had a day of good mood, and they came to a day hospital party, and now reading these party pies like there was no tomorrow's person's actual ability to swallow. Now I'm not saying it wasn't about risk was altered by their mood state and that that goes across the continuum of the areas which speech language therapists are involved with. So really important for outcomes and not just mood outcomes. You know, being depressed or anxious is distressing in itself. But you know, the ability to make a difference to people's physical and communicaiton outcomes of addressing psychological issues is considerable.   Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, I like the way that you describe that as being so intertwined and interconnected. So, you can't just separate those pieces out and say, I'm dealing with the physiological issues right now. Now I'm dealing with the psychological or the psychosocial and emotional issues, because there's so interconnected and, and I want to go back to a point you made earlier, which is, so often people early on have that sense of I'm going to be this, it's, I'm not going down the road a year, I'm not going to be one of those people who needs this. So, I'm just going to, you know, nose to the grindstone kind of work through this right now. But it can pop its head up anywhere in that recovery. And, and I think there's some reality that sets in once some of those initial supports are taken away.   Ian Kneebone: I mean, one of the biggest challenges I've faced when I've been in in stroke rehabilitation, and working with Speech, Language Therapists is around when people are using compensation, being asked to use compensation, as a strategy for communication and kind of dealing with all that mean, I'm not going to get any better with my speech. And, and, and, you know, people get really angry, and it's their frustration, and so on, and there's, you know, therapists going to be blamed for it. So, there's a real, real strategy there for dealing with that, and, you know, working with people to retain, retain hope. But you know, being pragmatic with well, you're leaving the hospital, now, you're going to have to communicate there in the community, you want to get out and do some of the things or at least some of the things you used to then how are we going to do this? And how are we going to approach it? But yeah, it can be quite a crisis point.   Jerry Hoepner: And I Yeah, and I think part of our role as a speech language therapist in that context, is to communicate that really well in a way that doesn't set them up for oh, you're switching over to compensatory approaches that you that means you think that I can no longer improve, in terms of my abilities, but rather to convey this is one of several things that we want you to do to be more successful, and to continue to engage. That's, I mean, that's kind of for speech language pathologists who are supposed to be good at communicating those things. We don't always do a very good job of communicating those things. I was thinking a little bit about Deborah Hersch's work on transitions and discharges and how poorly we do and saying, This is what's going to happen. We've got these limitations of the system. But this is the plan, this is not something that you did wrong, this is something that we just need to work through. And when we, I think when we feel discomfort about conveying things like it's time to transition home, or it's time to transition out of therapy, that we don't do a very good job of explaining those things.   Ian Kneebone: Well, I've certainly worked with a lot of members of stroke teams, allied health and speech pathologists, but one of the one of the difficulties, of course, is when we feel uncomfortable about doing it, and it's not the news, people want to hear we kind of beat around the bush. And then when people aren't clear, and you've got people with cognitive and communication problems, it's kind of a perfect storm for it to go amiss. Yeah. So, I think one of the messages I give out is people think if they just communicate it really well, it'll all be fine, and it'll go work fantastically, and people will transition really smoothly. But it's a bit of a wakeup call to realize, however well you put it, this is sometimes news people don't want to hear, and that there's going to be a reaction to that. And just to appreciate that it's not necessarily your fault. But there's the reaction that is it is people becoming aware of limitations going into the future, not the not the recovery they wanted, but the recovery they've got and supporting someone through that is a challenge when sometimes, you know, you're the target of dissatisfaction.   Jerry Hoepner: Right? No, that's such an important point. Just being cautious of that as well. Because certainly, certainly that's an important thing to consider. I'm interested in the process of interprofessional collaboration with mental health professionals with psychotherapists. What are your thoughts on the best way to approach a collaboration or setting up a collaboration with a mental health provider rather than an “oh, this person's got needs beyond what I can provide? Take them off my hands.”   Ian Kneebone: It's just so essential. One of the struggles we've had is that you know many people in my own profession, which is clinical psychology will say, well that this person can't communicate, I can't provide them with therapy. And that's so disappointing because we know if we modify them, we can do that. But certainly, my clinical experience in collaboration is that, you know, working closely with a speech language therapist about the best ways to communicate with someone they've, you know, very thoroughly assessed, is really useful in allowing me to learn and, you know, I work in session with, with therapists, as well as you know, gaining assessments and information and talking to them about that before it. And really importantly, there's a lot of in the research we're doing about collaborating, particularly with collaborating, particularly with speech language therapists, to be able to do those sorts of prevention work and, and therapies we've, we've discussed. And that's been such a joy working with Amanda Lakute, and some other people on that work, and Miranda Rose's team in looking at optimizing mental health and wellbeing in designing, for instance, Jas Sekhon's work, we know, on teaching Speech, Language Therapists, you know, counseling skills, so that they feel competent to support people that first step on the ladder, but also dealing with how speech language therapists can obtain the skills. And also really importantly, this is bringing onboard people with aphasia, to the co-design work, to design things that we know will be effective with them rather. So, we're not doing things to people, we're doing things with people and looking at the best way of designing our interventions. And not just our research, but our clinical interventions, so that they translate well into the different environments, healthcare environments that we work in.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, and kind of three really important points for a speech language pathologist, one, having that training to feel more confident and comfortable with actually carrying out those level one, psychological interventions, but also having training on how to teach mental health professionals how to interact. So, training those communication support strategies is a big part of our role. And if there should be something that we're comfortable with, we should be comfortable as speech language pathologist with training others on how to use those communication supports and   Ian Kneebone: Jas of course is a speech language therapist, Jas and she has got such a great course and such a nice way of delivering that in the speech, language therapy world that it's, it's so nice, and then people say, well, Ian, can't you go and teach us in counseling and like, you know, I'm happy to provide counseling training and different psychotherapies. But, you know, the role model that people like Jas provides in saying, well, this leads, not only can Speech Language Therapists use these therapies I can try and others in them because, but you also know, it's a competency within, within the scope of, of every practitioner really. Yeah,   Jerry Hoepner: absolutely. And, and I think sometimes we forget about that piece, kind of think it's a given that we're going to be able to train other professionals, but I think, also, there's a little bit of that uncertainty, when you're working with someone else about expertise and roles and territory and all of those things you might kind of back off in terms of providing the thing that you are the very, you know, what is your kind of bread and butter, your biggest strength in terms of teaching those things. So, I agree, Jas is fantastic, and the work that she's done in that area has been just so helpful and moving us forward from an educational standpoint.   Ian Kneebone: I guess as a psychologist, I kind of assumed a lot of that work would be the net training was available in courses but as we know, from the surveys and so on, but it has been a bit hit and miss despite the demands and like guidelines, like the Royal College in, in the UK, for people to have those roles, and then it's kind of I know, it's hard to fit everything into the into courses, because there's so much new material on different ways of intervening and assessing, but it's such a core skill that it's good to see that those who may have missed it on the way through that they're released post, you know, these master courses that provide people with to fill in that gap.   Jerry Hoepner: Agreed. And again, there's a lot of a lot of training that still needs to happen yet and a lot more changes to happen in the graduate student training programs for speech language pathologists as well.   Ian Kneebone: When I'm talking to you from Australia, of course, and we're no exception here despite you know the leading lights that we have in this country for speech pathology and trading and communication and counseling skills for people with aphasia we're still working on it here and I know from your surveys, that's still a challenge in the US as well. So, it's a piece of work in progress.   Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, it definitely is. At least there's some awareness of it. And we're starting to make a little bit of ground, I think in terms of awareness. And definitely when we have international programs for training, speech language pathologists and speech language therapists from a counseling standpoint, but also for working together collaborating on research internationally, I think that bodes well, for our future, I think we're moving in the right direction. I want to return.. Oh, go ahead.   Ian Kneebone: No, no, I'm just agreeing with you. So Oh,   Jerry Hoepner: Oh gotcha. I want to return to the other point that you made about codesign, with individuals with aphasia, involved in that process. And I might have you talk a little bit about the relaxation program that you co designed the calmer program and kind of how that was set up. And what you've learned from that?   Ian Kneebone: Well, we pretty much it's run by Rebecca El-Helou, who's a PhD about the completed a PhD with me, and she's done a range of work, including the Kalmer project, which is part of what we call REDS, which was Reducing Emotional Distress in Stroke program. And we just thought, like, you know, relaxation, it's, it's one of these things that we know works with the general population really well. And, but it's not offered to people after stroke generally, or wouldn't necessarily people with aphasia after stroke. And so one of the things we wanted to do by that is, you know, start developing the evidence base, and we thought, you know, really, there are all these great relaxation programs out there, but will they work with people with aphasia, I mean, the advantages, of course, they can be very communication life, because of the nature of the interventions, you know, which is about, you know, focusing attention, reducing autonomic arousal, using breathing and so forth. So, they can be very nonverbal. So, with you, this is eminently suited, and it's also something that could be online, it can be on your phone, right. And it's such a great thing in terms of accessibility. So we work with people with aphasia, because we thought like a lot of, despite the low level of communication required, that it may not suit everybody, we weren't going to assume that people with aphasia would, would take to it necessarily, and we're so pleased that we got a group I think about 10 or 11, people who were involved with us in looking and going through the, the sort of standardized programs, and then looking at how we could reduce down the communication, and how we could also, you know, just make it user friendly, and whether people needed to care or not to support them in, in getting them online to do it. And just really tightening up something and tailoring it to people with aphasia. So, we've got about two levels of communication, for instance, which people can dial up depending on their needs. And, you know, and while I say we will talk with people with aphasia, we also of course, include speech language therapists and  uh Brooke Ryan, you may have heard her doing her work, she's out in western Australia at Curtin University now doing a great job in, in looking at psychosocial work with people with Aphasia out there. And, you know, certainly it was gone, guided by all the current guidelines on supporting people with aphasia, not only to do the relaxation training, but to communicate their views on the relaxation training and how we might modify it to be more appropriate. So that was great. And we also have recently done behavioral activation study, there's just been a publication in Aphasiology about behavioral activation, which is an intervention, which, at its simplest, is a getting people re engaged with their environment, doing things that they enjoy that they've got mastery over, and they value. And also looking at how it can produce an online program that would support people once again, with or without a carer, to undertake that in a really accessible way assessing accessible communicatively but also because it's online, it's available at the time of your own choosing. And we're really lucky we may not be known as well internationally is in Australia, but we had a lot of work from the Black Dog Institute here, which is developed a lot of online programs. So, we also benefited from their huge expertise in this area, in, in developing something that we hope is going to be really great for people with aphasia and, you know, just get the resource out there. I mean, some of the work we've done is trying to get, you know, health services to be out able to offer treatments but you know, getting clinicians with the time. And you know, getting resources to do that is a real challenge. So, you know, we've got to go with where people may be able to access things themselves through Stroke Association, stroke, foundations, those sorts of things, where possible, so that we can get things out there and kind of like, circumvent all the problems of resourcing in the health community, which, you know, we've got a very different approaches to healthcare in the US and Australia, but the same, the same struggle in trying to get resources to people. And so, we're just looking across the board and how we can do that in this online stuff, particularly with the assistance of real experts, like Black Dog has been a great opportunity here. And we're just like, inevitably looking for funding for the next stage where we can roll it out and provide an evidence base to how useful this might be to people with aphasia after stroke. Jerry Hoepner: I think that's so useful. And I want to kind of make the connection between behavioral activation and the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia interventions that Aphasia Access stands for. And that's just such an important part of everything that we do from a life participation approach is increasing that participation, finding ways to get people reengaged in authentic, meaningful things that they care about. So, I want to make that connection. And the way that that might look for individuals could be part of a community group, it could be an aphasia camp like we offer, and I know that Linda Worrall's group started at a camp in Australia a couple of years ago as well. So they've got a couple under their belt, or, and I think I like this extension into the accessible online format that can reach as many people as possible, even if that's like the way that gets them into the loop, because I think it's hard initially to, to invest in going someplace or becoming a part of a group, things like that. But certainly, there's something to be said about once you're in and once you have that success that comes with having the right supports and having peers who understand you, then it's a little bit easier to take that next step, I think,   Ian Kneebone: Oh, absolutely. And like the across this kind of leisure rehabilitation is something our occupational therapies, therapists colleagues talk about, and the behaviors talk about environment enrichment and so on. And, you know, battle activations, all in that ballpark, and really important for people, as you say, it's certainly part of, you know, Miranda Rose and her team are doing work on community aphasia groups, which are kind of exciting, because they're led by people with aphasia, once again, because of the resources, issues that happens with, you know, trying to fund these sorts of activities. And, you know, there's, that's certainly an important part, and also meeting in the group, as you know, is a valuable, enjoyable experience, both in terms of the support from right from people, you know, looking at what other people are doing, and getting engaged with that, but also, you know, being on a similar journey, and the support that that can give to other people's is, is really valuable, I think, is as part of the process that leads to the positive experiences from those groups. Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. And I, and I hope our listeners I got pretty savvy listeners, I hope they pick up on that connection as an important way to return to those meaningful activities and to have a positive effect on mood and other psychological domains. Ian Knebone: Well, watch this space because the works, you know, the initial works being done, but they're rolling it out in Australia, where they've just got some, some country-type areas involved in offering this training to people. So they've developed some really comprehensive training things for the materials for the people, the professionals that support this program, but also for the people with aphasia who lead the groups. There's a PhD should Kathryn Pettigrove, who, who you should get a podcast on, she's just amazing and excited about this work, and you may have seen her in the US recently, but such talks with such enthusiasm about it. So, I would recommend that to you and your listeners. And as the evidence comes out, and it's going to be a great model, I think for helping people to help themselves. Really.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. And you're right, we definitely need to get her on this podcast. I'll write that down as soon as we're done, make sure that we follow up with that terrific point. (See episode 86) Episode #86: Making Aphasia Groups Work   Ian Kneebone: And she's just so enthusiastic, new energy coming into the, into this area, not that there's a lack of energy, but it's just nice to see that, you know, a few people hanging on the baton.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. Yeah. It's great to great to spread that out. Because there's so much to do. There's no no lack of things to do in this area, for sure. I'm interested in your thoughts. You talked a little bit about Jas Sekhon, but your perspectives on training, both future speech language pathologists who are in their training programs and existing speech language therapists pathologist who are already working clinically in seeking continuing education. Can you talk about some of the keys from your perspective to making that education successful?   Ian Kneebone: The first step is, you know, there's still a little bit of work in saying this, you know, convincing people this is part of their role, because some people will, will think, Well, no, I just hand this over to the psychologists that I you know, I don't think we can, we can accept that but, but moving forward. With that, it's really integrating, you know, the right, you know, say step one type interventions like problem solving, behavioral activation, relaxation therapies, and so on, right in into training courses, because these, these are things that, you know, people say, what's a psychological therapy? How am I going to do that? Well, it because it's psychological therapy, it doesn't have to be done by a psychologist is the first point. And a lot of it's kind of manualized and fairly intuitive to professionals. And many people come and say, you know, problem solving, and I've been dealing with all these challenges in my life already. And this just makes such sense. I wish I'd kind of it just, I should have known this already. Because, you know, I'm a slight person, I've got a master's degree in speech, and language therapy. But you know, it's so useful to me as well, and handing over to my clients is just really great. I mean, we do know, there's some work that's been done in the UK looking about Peter Knapp and his colleagues at looking at problem solving as a prevention and, you know, really good RCT results on how that prevents, you know, psychiatric psychological symptoms after stroke.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely.   Ian Kneebone: So, I think it's just rolling out and getting people to be to get over their concerns about and Jazz Jazz program. If you would, then that's, you know, specific counseling skills, but also then add some of these other strategies in. And we've got some experience in doing that recently. It's with step care, Carolyn Baker, who's at Monash University here in Melbourne, has been doing some work with with both online and offline online because of COVID in rolling out these therapies with allied health practitioners, including psychologists, but also Speech, Language Therapists, and being able to do that, and the main thing is just the kind of the structural issues in, you know, adding to people's workload, and allowing the system to support the investment that will, you know, lead, as we say, not just to people coping better with things but also improve, you know, the functional outcomes after stroke. So, while that's been a bit of a mixed feast, in terms of, you know, outcomes, because it's just been so hard to get these systems to take on board the training and get, get the people through these very straightforward psychological interventions that we know will almost certainly benefit people. But we're doing that, as I say, a two-pronged approach, we're looking at the self-help co-design work that can go online and so on and be accessible that way. And also trying to, you know, train every day, healthcare workers in being able to provide these to people with aphasia.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, and when you say, fitting in to people's schedule, or their workload, I mean, I just think that goes both ways, because not addressing these things really limit your outcomes in terms of, kind of, like you said, the communication outcomes are going to improve as those psychosocial outcomes begin to improve.   Ian Kneebone: You know, it's short sighted not to make this investment. But you know, doesn't mean it'll net. And so, you know, the logic doesn't necessarily follow, right. In terms of what happens with healthcare resources. And the other thing is, I guess, we're talking about all what suspects with therapists, fleet Language Therapists role is really important that not to throw the baby out with the bathwater is that, you know, like, if someone's communication can improve their depression and anxiety will improve as well. So, you know, as I often say, when I'm talking to training other allied health people, you know, we've all you know, you've all abandoned the session because someone said or stressed or upset and so on. But if you keep on doing that, something's got to change. You can either refer them on or do some collaborative work with somebody, but not, you know, not stopped doing the OT or the physio or speech language therapy, because you know, those things have to come along with as you were saying earlier, they're all joined up.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely, no, that's a, that's a really great point. And they all have to happen simultaneously to be effective, for sure. Ian earlier, you were talking about Carolyn Baker's work, her recent work, and I'm really interested in the low intensity psychotherapeutic interventions from the eDelphi study. Just wondering about kind of your thoughts on what the place is for those you mentioned occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech language therapist. Ian Kneebone: This is Carolyn's most recent work, which is the last data we kept it in the middle of this year has been rolling out training to people, you know medical nursing, speech language therapists and also psychologists in kind of first level step care for people with stroke. So, people were enrolled in the program, and some was telehealth some was not. And they would then choose one of three therapies that they thought might suit them best. And that would be problem solving behavioral activation or relaxation therapy, and then they'd have seven sessions of therapy with that. So these were people who weren't necessarily psychological therapists, although some were providing, providing these sessions within a current health system that's operating day to day with the practitioners from the current health system, rather than you know, someone coming in and doing a great RCT. But then the resources disappear, and you go away, no matter what you prove, one way or the other. And that's been a real eye opener, I mean, that there were major challenges when we started that because of COVID, because so many healthcare workers, as I'm sure there were in the, in the US were, were redirected to other tasks to do with the epidemic. But we've soldiered on, and got that it's a really great learning experience to see. See how that went, how it was rolled out. And we've got one at a time and qualitative evidence that we're going through, it's starting to sift through at the moment to look at what we can really learn from that project about how we do this going forward. I mean, I do not at the moment, it's just that that redirection of resources, particularly under COVID, was so difficult. And that was perhaps a unique time. But the resources, as I was saying earlier, are always under scrutiny and precious. So, right. It's about I think, partly getting the evidence base and so on. So we were talking about relaxation therapy recently. And I've got the irony of people saying, well, you know, you put it in a grant application to do to demonstrate the treatment efficacy, and people said, well, it's relaxation therapy, why wouldn't work? Of course it will work. And then, and then the people say, well, we can't put it in policy, because there's no evidence base. So you kind of you know, it even the same, the in the same grant round. Yeah. And so we're just doing it anyway, we're doing it with PhD students, we're doing it with, you know, startup resources that Miranda Rose in the Center of Research Excellence in Aphasia Rehabilitation in Melbourne have got hold of for us. And we're going to demonstrate the usefulness. So, people will put it in their guidelines and so on. And then the UK National Stroke guidelines, say all this great stuff about some relaxation training, we do the same, but there isn't sufficient, not sufficient numbers, significantly power to demonstrate efficacy and so on. I'm just really grateful they mentioned some of Vaour work. But then I kind of have well, yes, but and, you know, that means it's not rolled out. I used to work in a stroke rehabilitation word in Vatum, in the UK, and we had a number of Allied Health assistants, you know, physiotherapy assistants who've gone off and done all this training in how to do relaxation with people that didn't get any time to provide. So it's kind of like, oh, gosh, you know, it is hard to, sometimes to, to get this happening. But you know, I think there is saying that, but there is kind of a, it's a right time. And you were talking to me before about, you know, five, you know, psychosocial guidelines for people with aphasia, and so on that were being developed. And I think the more that we do that, the more the ability will be there to leverage those resources to people who need them.   Jerry Hoepner: Agreed. I think that is a really good place to start to wind down our conversation because I think we're moving in the right direction. Still, still plenty of work to do, but I'm wondering, kind of as a as a summary are there are two or three things that you think speech language therapist, working with people with aphasia should keep in mind from a psychological intervention standpoint, and what's a good starting point?   Ian Kneebone: Well, I think it's probably the three things I do is like, you know, take it on as part of your work to be aware of these, these these issues and try not to shy away from As tempting as that may be. So, the first thing is, you know, there are good instruments for now that we have screening for anxiety and depression so you can pick those up and they're well within your skill base to use. And then getting the skills and training and things like counseling if you don't have them already, or you don't feel confident in using them, and then getting access to some of these other things. So like Caroline's work, you know, we're hopefully the publish the manual shortly that can guide people, speech language therapists in using those treatments. So that will be something that's out there and a resource that people can use. And once again with it well within the competence of, you know, speech language therapists. And I think finally, you know, just using the great communication skills you've got, even when you're sort of giving people difficult news to receive that. And just being as clear as you can be, you know, how to do the communication. And, you know, kind of accepting people are going to be frustrated. But, but giving it the clarity and the justification in a way that retains people's hope for further recovery but it's pragmatic, to get them functioning as well as they can in the community, because that's so much of the key to people going forward.   Jerry Hoepner: Absolutely. And that's, that's our whole goal to get them reintegrated as much as possible.   Ian Kneebone: So, awareness, skills, communicating effectively regarding the difficulties and the challenges.   Jerry Hoepner: Excellent summary. Well, Ian, it's been fantastic having this conversation. Great to have it again, I don't remember exactly how many years ago we talked. But it's great to have that follow up conversation. And I know our listeners will really enjoy this conversation. So, thank you for being here today.   Ian Kneebone: I'm more than happy to help out and thanks for all the speech language therapists who have contributed to my work. I wouldn't be here without them. And it's great to see this interprofessional learning moving forward. If I hadn't missed out any of the great people I've worked with, I do apologize. But there's just too many of you now, which is part of the success story.   Jerry Hoepner: Yeah, that's a good problem to have. Well, thank you again. Goodbye.   Ian Kneebone: Thanks, Jerry.   Jerry Hoepner: On behalf of Aphasia Access, thank you for listening to this episode of the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. For more information on Aphasia Access and to access our growing library of materials go to www.aphasiaaccess.org. If you have an idea for a future podcast series or topic, email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.   Resources: El-Helou, R., Ryan, B., & Kneebone, I. (2023). Development of the “Kalmer” relaxation intervention: co-design with stroke survivors with aphasia. Disability and rehabilitation, 45(9), 1517-1529. Kneebone, I. I. (2016). Stepped psychological care after stroke. Disability and rehabilitation, 38(18), 1836-1843. Morris, R., Eccles, A., Ryan, B., & Kneebone, I. I. (2017). Prevalence of anxiety in people with aphasia after stroke. Aphasiology, 31(12), 1410-1415. Ryan, B., Bohan, J., & Kneebone, I. (2019). Help‐seeking and people with aphasia who have mood problems after stroke: perspectives of speech–language pathologists. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 54(5), 779-793. Ryan, B., Kneebone, I., Rose, M. L., Togher, L., Power, E., Hoffmann, T., ... & Worrall, L. (2023). Preventing depression in aphasia: A cluster randomized control trial of the Aphasia Action Success Knowledge (ASK) program. International Journal of Stroke, 18(8), 996-1004. Sekhon, J. K., Oates, J., Kneebone, I., & Rose, M. (2019). Counselling training for speech–language therapists working with people affected by post‐stroke aphasia: a systematic review. International journal of language & communication disorders, 54(3), 321-346. Sekhon, J. K., Oates, J., Kneebone, I., & Rose, M. L. (2022). Counselling education for speech-language pathology students in Australia: A survey of education in post-stroke aphasia. Aphasiology, 36(12), 1417-1446. Sekhon, J. K., Oates, J., Kneebone, I., & Rose, M. L. (2023). A phase II randomised controlled trial evaluating the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of an education program on speech-language pathologist'self-efficacy, and self-rated competency for counselling to support psychological wellbeing in people with post-stroke aphasia. Topics in stroke rehabilitation, 30(8), 842-864.

In March's news:- Response to the Budget- Vacancies in speech and language therapy survey- Nurses' pay scale response- Buckland review of autism employment https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-response-to-the-buckland-review-of-autism-employment/- Scottish Parliament committee evidence- Ramadan guidance https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/RCSLT_Ramadan_Guidance_FINAL.pdf- #InvestInSLT petition reaches 10,000 signatures: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/657935- Swallow Awareness Day event in the SeneddPlease do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

This episode will focus on our experiences of being AuDHD Speech & Language Therapists. Including our journey through training to clinical practice and our specialisms. We'll discuss what life is like as a neurodivergent SLT and the benefits and challenges we encounter. It's a celebration of our differences and how they support our professional careers. Trigger warning: discussion of mental health difficulties and trauma. Find more information from us here: Social media: @neurotalk_podcast, @autistically_me & @hat.talks.uk www.hattalks.uk Etsy: Hat Talks Shop 

In February's news:-  RCSLT joins organisations from around Europe to declare a commitment to support children who face language challenges.https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-joins-the-historic-launch-of-atlas-think-first-manifesto-at-the-house-of-lords/- What the return to power sharing in Northern Ireland means for speech and language therapy: https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-ni-welcomes-assembly-motion/- Local council cuts in Scotland.- Wales to go big on Swallowing Awareness Day and update on youth justice summit. https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-wales-plays-key-role-in-welsh-government-summit-on-youth-justice/- Latest campaigning for the general election. https://www.rcslt.org/news/call-to-party-leaders-letstalkcommunication/- Tell us about your vacancy situation in our latest vacnacies survey: https://www.rcslt.org/policy-and-influencing/uk-wide/vacancy-survey/- and much more.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

Matthew Mills (he, him) is a Lead Consultant Speech and Language Therapist, and Head of Speech and Language Therapy at the London Gender Identity Clinic, where he has worked since 2009. He is a National Adviser in Trans Voice for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, founder member of the Trans Voice Clinical Excellence Network and External Examiner for the Voice Studies MA/MFA at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Matthew is current President of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialsts (BAGIS). VOICE CHOICE Listen to Matthew's favourite vocal performance ‘Home' MJ Rodriguez on the VocalScope Podcast Guests Playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4pjclKQVRnnUnMW0vgu0H0?si=8380f4264b42464e  VOCALSCOPE BOOK CLUB - Join the VocalScope Book Club: https://www.vocalscopevoice.com/bookclub  VOCALSCOPE Linktree: https://linktr.ee/vocalscope  VOCALSCOPE Socials: @vocalscope www.vocalscopevoice.com

What happens to children on a waiting list when they aren't receiving treatment? How many continue to need intervention and how many improve spontaneously? It's difficult to research because it's too hard to collect this data ethically and also without impacting the subjects and therefore potentially changing the results.Nevertheless, occasional opportunities arise for reviewing data from waiting lists. In this podcast we chat with Elizabeth and Sue about their research into an ethnically diverse community paediatric speech and language therapy service waiting list in the UK, where levels of social disadvantage are high.The paper is:  Outcomes from a community speech and language therapy service treatment waiting list: The natural history of 525 children with identified speech and language needshttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12877Elizabeth Hesketh, Paul White, Doug Simkiss & Sue RoulstoneFirst Published: 15 May 2023 Useful resources:Outcome measurement overview: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/guidance-for-delivering-slt-services/outcome-measurement/#section-2RCSLT Online Outcome Tool ('ROOT'): https://rcslt-root.orgInterview with Professor Pam Enderby:  https://soundcloud.com/rcslt/rcslt-podcast-pam_enderby-31-07-2020Find out more about ROOT: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/guidance-for-delivering-slt-services/outcome-measurement/#section-2 Enderby, P. and John, A. (2019) Therapy Outcome Measure User Guide. Croydon: J& R Press LtdLanguage growth in children with heterogeneous language disorders: a population study, Courtenay Frazier Norbury , George Vamvakas,  Debbie Gooch, Gillian Baird, Tony Charman , Emily Simonoff, Andrew PicklesChild Psychol Psychiatry; 2017 Oct;58 (10) :109 2-1105., https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.12793PROTOCOL: Language interventions for improving oral language outcomes in children with neurodevelopmental disorders: A systematic review - Nordahl‐Hansen - 2019 - Campbell Systematic Reviews - Wiley Online Library https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1062NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In January's news:- Workforce projects for 2024 - including roll out and embedding of the professional development framework; curriculum review; review of Newly Qualified Practitioner competencies; preceptorship; placement expansion; supporting the support workforce; career opportunities including enhanced practice and advanced clinical practice.  Supported by funding from NHSE - but to work across the UK.- Results of the second vacancies survey published today and third survey launched.- Current workstreams on equality, diversity and inclusion.- Other key issues around the UK.- Launch of the Voicebox joke telling competition for children in Scotland.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

What happens to children on a waiting list when they aren't receiving treatment? How many continue to need intervention and how many improve spontaneously? It's difficult to research because it's too hard to collect this data ethically and also without impacting the subjects and therefore potentially changing the results. Nevertheless, occasional opportunities arise for reviewing data from waiting lists.  In this podcast we chat with Elizabeth and Sue about their research into an ethnically diverse community paediatric speech and language therapy service waiting list in the UK, where levels of social disadvantage are high.The paper is:  Outcomes from a community speech and language therapy service treatment waiting list: The natural history of 525 children with identified speech and language needsElizabeth Hesketh, Paul White, Doug Simkiss & Sue RoulstoneFirst Published: 15 May 2023 Useful resources:Outcome measurement overview: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/guidance-for-delivering-slt-services/outcome-measurement/#section-2Interview with Professor Pam Enderby https://soundcloud.com/rcslt/rcslt-podcast-pam_enderby-31-07-2020 Find out more about ROOT: www.rcslt.org/speech-and-languag…urement/#section-2NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In today's episode, we are delving into the groundbreaking world of AI art expression for those with Motor Neuron Disease (or MND) such as ALS. We spoke with guests Franklin Williams and Evan Schmidt from the AREA 23 Agency, along with Richard Cave from the MND Association. Richard Cave is a Speech and Language Therapist, working with the MND Association and also with Google, providing specialist Speech Therapy consultancy to the technology teams.He is also PhD candidate at University College London, national adviser to Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists for voice banking and 2022 Allied Professional of the Year recipient from the International Alliance of ALS/MND Associations.Then from Area 23, we have Franklin Williams and Evan Schmidt. As EVP, Executive Director of Experience Design, Franklin is an ideal blend of creativity, user experience, and technology, and has been using his passion for innovation to elevate the importance of experience design in the advertising industry for nearly 20 years. Along with Franklin we also have Evan Schmidt, Associate Creative Director (Art) at AREA 23. Evan is a dynamic creative fueled by an unwavering passion for AI art. With a background in illustration and a flair for innovation, he seamlessly integrates AI algorithms into his artistic vision, crafting visually stunning and thought-provoking pieces. Together with the team at AREA 23 an IPG Health Company, Evan helped to develop the Mind's Eye app. Mind's Eye is the world's first AI art expression tool for people with MND/ALS. As an Associate Creative Director, Evan inspires his team to embrace the transformative power of AI, creating a new era of visually captivating and intellectually stimulating experiences.In our conversation, we unravelled the journey behind Mind's Eye, exploring its purpose, unique features, and the impact it has on the lives of its users. We also uncover the synergy between Mind's Eye and the Smart Eye assistive technology partner Smartbox (who use our eye tracking to help give a voice to those who are unable to) the pivotal role of eye tracking technology, and hear inspiring user stories. Evan has an exciting call-to-action for our listeners—try Mind's Eye in Grid with a 60-day free trial for Windows or a 30-day free trial for iPad at thinksmartbox.com/try-grid. Get ready for a deep dive into the transformative realm of Mind's Eye and the evolution of human-centric AI!Links of interest: [Try it] Try Mind's Eye in Grid with a 60-day free trial:  thinksmartbox.com/try-grid [Watch] Mind's Eye: https://minds-eye.app/home/[Read] Smart Box: https://thinksmartbox.com/products/eye-gaze/[Get] Smart Eye Smart Box Case Study: https://smarteye.se/testimonials/empowering-people-with-disabilities-with-eye-tracking-technology-a-smartbox-and-smart-eye-collaboration/

In December's news:- Roll call of the sucesses of 2023, in spite of the severe challenges- Key issues for the speech and language therapy profession around the UK at the moment- What to expect in 2024This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In November's news catch up:- RCSLT CEO Steve Jamieson tells us about the many different places he's been to meet RCSLT members - across the four nations of the UK and in a huge range of settings.- He tells us what he's learned from that experience and how that is shaping his thinking. - Overview of the recent Parliamentary event hosted by Saqib Bhatti MP and with broadcaster Chris Kamara.- A summary of key things happening around the UK which listeners will be interested in including:- RCSLT Wales gives evidence to Senedd enquiry on education https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-gives-evidence-to-senedd-enquiry-on-access-to-education/- RCSLT Wales and Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board host visit with minister for health and social services, Eluned Morgan, https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-wales-host-visit-with-minister-for-health-and-social-services/- Wins in areas of autism, stroke and early years.Please do feedback on our podcasts to help us improve them: tinyurl.com/RCSLTPodcastFeedback. Thank you!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In October's news:- RCSLT awards https://www.rcslt.org/news/congratulations-to-all-the-amazing-award-winners/- Party conference season- Intermediate care framework for rehab, reablement and recovery following hospital discharge- NIHCR evidence on aphasia after stroke- Focus on DLDPlease do feedback on our podcasts to help us improve them: tinyurl.com/RCSLTPodcastFeedback. Thank you!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

Most people diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) will develop speech impairment over the course of the disease. Some will develop cognitive, linguistic or behavioural disturbance. Does this impact their ability to be involved in and make decisions about their healthcare?In this podcast we chat with Dr Camille Paynter and Dr Susan Mathers about their research into this question.The paper is:  The impact of communication on healthcare involvement for people living with motor neurone disease and the careers: A longitudinal qualitative study. Camille Paynter, Susan Mathers, Heidi Gregory, Adam P. Vogel, Madeline CruiceFirst Published: 21 July 2022 Useful resources:Access the paper here: The impact of communication on healthcare involvement for people living with motor neurone disease and the careers: A longitudinal qualitative study. How people living with motor neurone disease and their carers experience healthcare decision making: a qualitative exploration. Paynter C, Mathers S, Gregory H, Vogel AP, Cruice M. Disabil Rehabil. 2022 Jun;44(13):3095-3103. doi: 10.1080/09638288.2020.1855261.  Using the Concept of Health Literacy to Understand How People Living with Motor Neurone Disease and Carers Engage in Healthcare: A Longitudinal Qualitative Study. Paynter C, Mathers S, Gregory H, Vogel AP, Cruice M. Healthcare (Basel). 2022 Jul 24;10(8):1371. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10081371. Communication and cognitive impairments and health care decision making in MND: A narrative review. Paynter C, Cruice M, Mathers S, Gregory H, Vogel AP. J Eval Clin Pract. 2019 Dec;25(6):1182-1192. doi: 10.1111/jep.13219.NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In September's news:- Autumn is a busy time in politics. Find out how the RCSLT is engaging to ensure speech and language therapy is represented.- Travelling around the UK - how the RCSLT is engaging with members face to face across the four nations.- Our submission of evidence to the Times Health Commission. https://www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-submits-evidence-to-the-times-health-commission/- ICS project- Autism guidance and McGowan mandatory training- Vacancies surveyPlease do feedback on our podcasts to help us improve them: tinyurl.com/RCSLTPodcastFeedback. Thank you!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In August's news:- Members - how to help us know more about the profession by completing your member profiles. (Login to your RCSLT 'My account' and click on 'Your profile' to access this.)- Takeaways from RCSLT visit to IALP 32nd world congress: ialpauckland2023.org/- RCSLT outcomes work and ROOT tool www.rcslt.org/speech-and-languag…tcome-measurement/- RCSLT events and webinars www.rcslt.org/events/- RCSLT conference bookings: www.rcslt.org/events/rcslt-conference-2023/- 2nd vacancy survey www.rcslt.org/news/second-vacanc…t-survey-now-open/- HCPC standards of proficiency www.hcpc-uk.org/standards/standar…s-of-proficiency/Please do feedback on our podcasts to help us improve them: tinyurl.com/RCSLTPodcastFeedback. Thank you!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Cara McDonagh, Director of Engagement and Communication.

In July's news:- Response to the long-awaited NHS England workforce plan. www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-respons…rm-workforce-plan/- How RCSLT is responding to shortages and waiting lists.- Senedd debate on criminal justice.- Student numbers in the nations.- Scottish children and young people posts for speech and language therapy and conversations with local government. www.rcslt.org/news/troubling-tim…erapy-in-scotland/- Children's language and the pandemic.- Labour's oracy announcement. www.rcslt.org/news/responding-to…rs-to-opportunity/- RCSLT conference bookings: www.rcslt.org/events/rcslt-conference-2023/Please do feedback on our podcasts to help us improve them: tinyurl.com/RCSLTPodcastFeedback. Thank you!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

'Primary progressive aphasia (PPA)' is an umbrella term for a group of language-led dementias which leave people unable to communicate effectively with others. PPA can have a devastating impact on people's ability to function and socialise. Speech and language therapy offers a range of potential benefits to people with PPA. However, until now there has been little research asking them and their families about what help they would like from speech and language therapy.  In this podcast we chat with Chris Hardy, Anna Volkmer, Jason Warren about their research (*and that of colleagues) about their research to answer that question.The paper is: ‘Like going into a chocolate shop, blindfolded': What do people with primary progressive aphasia want from speech and language therapy?*Maria Loizidou, Emilie Brotherhood, Emma Harding, Sebastian Crutch, Jason D. Warren, Chris J.D. Hardy, Anna VolkmerFirst Published: 30 November 2022 Useful resources:Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1460-6984.12818 Further resources:Rare dementia supporthttps://www.raredementiasupport.org/primary-progressive-aphasia/ A. Volkmer, J. Cartwright, L. Ruggero, A. Beales, J. Gallée, S. Grasso, M. Henry, R. Jokel, J. Kindell, R. Khayum, M. Pozzebon, E. Rochon, C. Taylor-Rubin, R. Townsend, F. Walker, S. Beeke & D. Hersh (2023) 'Principles and philosophies for speech and language therapists working with people with primary progressive aphasia: an international expert consensus' , Disability and Rehabilitation, 45:6, 1063-1078, DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2022.2051080  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09638288.2022.2051080?needAccess=true&role=buttonMarshall, C.R., Hardy, C.J.D., Volkmer, A. et al. Primary progressive aphasia: a clinical approach. J Neurol 265, 1474–1490 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-018-8762-6https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-018-8762-NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In RCSLT's June 2023 podcast:Current themes in speech and language therapy including: an ageing society; workforce; SEND review; Community rehabiliationProfessional development issues: NHSE (formerly HEE) projects coming to a close and achievements there; new support worker hub; professional development framework. For members, remember that the HCPC audit is coming in July so please get ready by updating your CPD diary.Where RCSLT has been recently and who has been to see us.Useful links:Get in touch with our Professional Enquiries team if you have any evidence for Judith for the report on an ageing population:  www.rcslt.org/help-and-support/contact-us/NHSE (formerly HEE) projects: www.rcslt.org/members/get-involv…-reform-programme/Support worker hub: www.rcslt.org/news/new-support-w…hub-and-framework/RCSLT Professional development framework: www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-profess…d-to-support-slts/Get in touch with our Professional Enquiries team if you have any questions about the HCPC audit: www.rcslt.org/help-and-support/contact-us/Podcast survey: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LG5HC3RThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs and Judith Broll, Director of Professional Development, at the RCSLT.

This, the third in our series of podcasts looking at anti-racism in speech and language therapy, centres on the Anti-racism survey report Feb 2023 which was researched and written by SLT student and EDI rep at Reading University, Chloe Nkomo.Chloe talks about the key takeaways from her report.  She is joined by Dorett Davis, one of the founders of the network group 'SLTs of Colour' and RCSLT chair Dr Sean Pert. The group discusses:Key findings from the report.Lessons learned, but what still needs to happen.What can each of us do about it? How to manage uncomfortable conversations.How to challenge racist behaviour, or practices that disadvantage minoritised groups.Being able to reflect on your own background and how that might marginalise or advantage you.Making a start on this journey.RCSLT's role in thisInterviewees:Chloe Nkomo, MSci Speech and Language Therapy at University of ReadingDorett Davis, Head of CYP Therapies, Lewisham, representing SLTs of ColourDr Sean Pert, Chair of the RCSLT and Senior Clinical Lecturer and Consultant Speech and Language TherapistUseful links from RCSLTAnalysing diversity, equity and inclusion in speech and language therapyNkomo, C., Pagnamenta, E., Nair, V., Chadd, K. and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. (2022). Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Available online: https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/ Anti-racism in AHP Education: Building an Inclusive Environment, Council of Deans of Health, April 2023Highlights the issues affecting minority ethnic Allied Health Professions (AHP) students and provides recommendations for how universities can embed the key principles of anti-racism within their processes.https://www.councilofdeans.org.uk/2023/04/council-of-deans-of-health-release-new-report-anti-racism-in-ahp-education-building-an-inclusive-environment/ RCSLT's anti-racism programme of learning: https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/programme-of-learning/ RCSLT list of resources on microaggressions and bullyinghttps://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/microaggressions-and-bullying-resources.pdf RCSLT materials on starting anti-racism conversations in your workplacehttps://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/programme-of-learning/#section-3 Reflecting on positionality using a social identity mapJacobson, D., & Mustafa, N. (2019). Social Identity Map: A Reflexivity Tool for Practicing Explicit Positionality in Critical Qualitative Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919870075Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

In RCSLT's May 2023 News podcast:- Dementia Action Week UK- Follow the @RCSLTNI account to engage with their Dementia Action Week Twitter Takeover https://twitter.com/RCSLTNI- Areas of focus including vacancies, prescribing, intermediate care, first contact practitioners, ELSEC - Updated healthcare standards for children in secure settings in England- RCSLT gave evidence to the school absence inquiry from The Education Committee- RCSLT survey on speech and language therapists' experiences of disability in the workplace - take part if you have a disability or not. Survey is open until Friday 26 May:  https://www.rcslt.org/news/disability-in-the-workplace-survey/- New national clinical guidelines for stroke: https://www.rcslt.org/news/new-national-clinical-guideline-for-stroke/- Key issues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland- Update on the Support worker framework- Making data count: https://www.rcslt.org/news/making-data-count/-  Nominate someone for the RCSLT Awards 2023: https://www.rcslt.org/news/celebrate-our-amazing-profession/This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

Does knowing whether a defendant has a diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder affect how mock jurors rate that defendant's levels of guilt, sentence length, credibility and blameworthiness?In this podcast we chat with Dr Hannah Hobson, Samantha Gamblen and Claire Westwood about the research they did to answer this question and what it revealed.The paper is:The impact of developmental language disorder in a defendant's description on mock jurors' perceptions and judgementsHannah Madaleine Hobson,  Jemma Woodley,  Samantha Gamblen,  Joanna Brackely,  Fiona O'Neill,  Danielle Miles,  Claire Westwood First Published: 10 September 2022 Useful resources: Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14606984/2023/58/1 Access the project dataset, vignette and codebook: https://osf.io/znve3/RCSLT open access guide to DLD: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/clinical-information/developmental-language-disorder/The Box elearning: Free learning to help with understanding what are speech, language and communication needs are and how to recognise them; plus strategies to support. https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/courses/the-box-learning-journey/ Mind your words: Children and young people:Free elearning to improve your understanding of children and young people with social, emotional and mental health needs and speech, language and communication needs.https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/courses/mind-your-words-children-and-young-peoples-mental-health/ NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In April's RCSLT News podcast:New RCSLT CEO, Steve Jamieson, shares his mission for RCSLT and messages for speech and language therapists and the people they support. (More about Steve here: www.rcslt.org/news/royal-college…w-chief-executive/)We look at the results of the recent survey into vacancies in SLT services and some of the media coverage this has generated: www.rcslt.org/news/vacancy-rates…-language-therapy/Senedd report highlights over-representation of young people with communication needs within criminal justice system: www.rcslt.org/news/senedd-report…al-justice-system/New Scottish health secretarry, Michael MathesonHEE merger with NHS England: www.hee.nhs.uk/hee-merges-with-nhs-england HCPC consultation on the proposed changes to the Standards of conduct, performance and ethics: www.hcpc-uk.org/news-and-events/n…mance-and-ethics/Anti-racism in AHP education report from the Council of Deans of Health: www.rcslt.org/news/anti-racism-in-ahp-education/It's the first #GreenerAHP week www.rcslt.org/news/sustainabilit…-language-therapy/New Professional Development Framework for SLTs: www.rcslt.org/news/rcslt-profess…d-to-support-slts/Statement on thickened fluids: www.rcslt.org/news/our-statement…-thickened-fluids/This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Steve Jamieson, RCSLT CEO.

In the March 2023 issue we cover:- The context of speech language therapy in Scotland right now- RCSLT's five key priorities for Scotland- An important win for funding in Edinburgh- The UK budget- SEND reform announcement and what it means- An overview of a recent event in Swansea- Discussions about the HCPC fee increase- Two big campaigns: 'Send in the specialists' and 'Prescribing now'.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Glenn Carter, Head of the RCSLT Scotland Office.Release date:20 March 2023

In this episode, Grace Walsh and SLT working in the area of infant mental health talks to Anna McLeod, and SLT working in CAMHS. Both are part of the IASLT Mental Health SIG and talk about the current and emerging roles of SLTs in the area of mental health

Artificial nutrition and hydration (AN&H) may be provided to individuals in the home environment, and family caregivers are often involved in the management of this intervention. This experience can have many consequences for families.In this podcast we chat with Dr Dominika Lisiecka and Dr Áine Kearns about their systematic review of family caregivers' experiences of artificial nutrition and hydration at home. The paper is:A qualitative systematic review of family caregivers' experiences of artificial nutrition and hydration at home: A meta‐ethnography - Lisiecka - 2022 - International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders Dominika Lisiecka, Áine Kearns, Aisling Bonass First published:  19 April 2022Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12726 NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In RCSLT's February news catch up we look at:- The prescribing campaign- Survey of Speech and language therapy vacant posts- Anti-racism deep dive report for speech and language therapy profession just out https://www.rcslt.org/news/new-insights-in-our-anti-racism-report/ - Updates on specialised commissioning in England- Public Health Scotland report on children's speech, language and communication development during the Covid-19 pandemic- Wales Senedd event - And much more!This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

We chat with Kerry, a registered nurse living with long Covid; speech and language therapist Rachel Nashed; and Professor Louise Cummings, to learn more about long covid, how it affects communication, and how can speech and language therapists support those living with the condition. Interviewees:Kerry Davies, (RGN) Registered General Nurse and Co-founder and member of Long Covid Nurses and Midwives UK Rachel Nashed, Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist and Treasurer of the South West Voice Clinical Excellence NetworkProfessor Louise Cummings, Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Resources:Long Covid Nurses and Midwives UK: https://teamlcnmuk.wixsite.com/lcnmuk NHS app reviews | Apps for recovery & rehabilitation | For survivors & clinicians: https://www.my-therappy.co.uk/ Long Covid: What's changed and what we know now, Liz Jackson,  BBC:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63546138How long Covid ruined my life (and why it won't go away), Rowland Manthorpe, Sky News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm8WsO_FQYkhttps://news.sky.com/story/how-long-covid-ruined-my-life-from-crushing-fatigue-to-brain-fog-12744444Articles:Long Covid: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2Cognitive-linguistic difficulties in adults with Long COVID, Prof. Louise Cummings: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003257318-5/cognitive-linguistic-difficulties-adults-long-covid-louise-cummings Communication-related quality of life in adults with Long COVID, Prof. Louise Cummings: https://tandfbis.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781003257318_10.4324_9781003257318-6.pdfCase studies of adults with COVID-19 infection, Prof. Louise Cummings: https://tandfbis.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781003257318_10.4324_9781003257318-13.pdfPragmatic impairment in COVID-19, Prof. Louise Cummings: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ip-2022-3001/html?lang=enCognitive-linguistic difficulties in COVID-19: A longitudinal case study, Prof Louise Cummings: https://synergypublishers.com/pms/index.php/ijslpa/article/view/2258Journal article: COVID-19 and language: A case study: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18uDm1o6dUoX8v91lpNPBCbO4e7TllJLl/viewThe long road back: Implications of COVID-19 for language and cognition, Cambridge University Press: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/10/the-long-road-back-implicatications

In this month's news catch up we look at:- Positives to come out of 2022 including raised awareness and apprenticeships- Focus areas for 2023 including workforce (England and Wales), Mental health and capacity, Covid enquiry and more.- Issues around the UK such as UK general election - and possibly Northern Ireland - and implications; and in Scotland communication accessibility and children's early language- Not forgetting, the uniform reviewThis interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In the December 2022 news we cover:- Achievements for the profession and RCSLT in 2022 - not least speech and language therapists continuing to deliver high quality evidence-based care in a challenging environment; but also in legislation; in guidance and secondary legislation; in research; and in collaborative working.- What's happening now around the UK: covering key issues in the four nations.- Looking ahead to 2023: continuing emphasis on morale and wellbeing; SEND reform in England; and a journey to co-production across RCSLT workstreams.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

40 - SCREEN TIME the okay, bad and ugly from speech & language therapists @weetalkersHey Shayla Podcast | Ep: 040Guests: Carly & Katie speech & language therapists  @weetalkersWee talkers screen Tv show recommendations: https://www.weetalkers.com/blog//tv-shows-for-young-childrenWeetalkers story and song: https://www.heyshayla.com/weetalkerspodDISCOUNT CODE: HEYSHAYLAThank you for listening to the Hey Shayla podcast!  Here, we love to learn new things and decide what works for us and our family.. We're the moms that support instead of judge and know there are many ways to do something right.  I'd love to connect on Instagram @heyshaylaScreentime is such a touchy subject!  We're already guilty for letting our kids watch it, do we really want to know how bad it is? Is it okay to use it as a tool so I can get something done? Is one device better than the other? Are there different show qualities? IS SCREEN TIME BAD?!If you've wondered these things, this is a judgement free episode about screen time. Xo ShayJoin the email list to be notified when episodes go live HERE!Companies I work with:*Weetalkers: Quality "screen time" story time! *California Beach Co: Travel Playpen use HEYSHAYLA for discount*Expecting and Empowered: Pregnancy and Postpartum workouts use code HEYSHAYLA for discount*LoveBug Probiotics: Pre and postnatal probiotics use code HEYSHAYLA for discount*My Little Eaters: Guide to Baby Led Weaning use code HEYSHAYLA for discount*Kindred Bravely: Maternity Sports Bra use code HEYSHAYLA fordiscount*Clearly Filtered: Filtered water bottle pitcher use code HEYSHAYLA for discount*TushBaby: Great “Up-Down” Baby carrier use code HEYSHAYLA for discount*Iksplor: Wool base layer HEYSHAYLA for discountLet's Connect!Instagram (@heyshayla),YouTube (Hey Shayla)Website (www.heyshayla.com)Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/shop/heyshayla)**Disclaimer: Please note that some of the links here are affiliate links. Which means at no cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase after clicking through the link. I only work with companies that I love, and that I think you will love.

In this podcast we chat with Àngels Esteller Cano, one of the authors of a paper looking at bullying trajectories in adults with self-reported oral language difficulties. The study looked at seven educational stages, from preschool to university.The paper is:Retrospective bullying trajectories in adults with self-reported oral language difficultiesÀngels Esteller-Cano,Lucía Buil-Legaz,Raúl López-Penadés,Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla,Daniel Adrover-RoigFirst published:  23 February 2022Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12708 Resources:Development, Education, and Language Research Laboratory (I + DELab) https://idel.uib.eu/ NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Lyssa Rome is a speech-language pathologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is on staff at the Aphasia Center of California, where she facilitates groups for people with aphasia and their care partners. She owns an LPAA-focused private practice and specializes in working with people with aphasia, dysarthria, and other neurogenic communication impairments. She has worked in acute hospital, skilled nursing, and continuum of care settings. Prior to becoming an SLP, Lyssa was a public radio journalist, editor, and podcast producer. In this episode, Lyssa Rome interviews Jasvinder Sekhon about her work on enabling SLPs to feel confident and competent in counseling people with post-stroke aphasia and their families.   Gap Areas This episode focuses on on Gap Area 8: Insufficient attention to depression and low mood across the continuum of care.   Guest info   Jasvinder Sekhon is a speech-language pathologist currently working clinically in Melbourne, Australia. Since graduating from La Trobe University in the early 1990s, Jas has worked across the continuum of care in public health services in Victoria, Australia and briefly in Singapore. Jas has been involved in the aphasia community for many years and co-convened the inaugural online Australian Aphasia Association national conference in 2021.   Jas has recently completed her PhD, where she investigated counselling education that enabled SLPs to feel confident and competent using counselling to support the psychological wellbeing of individuals with aphasia and their families after stroke. Jas' supervisors for her doctorate were Professors Jennifer Oates and Miranda Rose from La Trobe University and Professor Ian Kneebone from University Technology of Sydney. Her studies sit under the research program Optimising Mental Health and Wellbeing of the Aphasia Centre for Research Excellence and Rehabilitation. The director of this CRE is Professor Miranda Rose.    Listener Take-aways In today's episode you will: Learn about the stepped model for psychological care. Understand how speech-language pathologists can support psychological well-being for people with post-stroke aphasia. Identify the role of speech-language pathologists within an interdisciplinary team providing psychological care for people with post-stroke aphasia. Show notes edited for conciseness Lyssa Rome Welcome to the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. I'm Lyssa Rome. I'm a speech language pathologist on staff at the Aphasia Center of California, and I see clients with aphasia and other neurogenic communication impairments in my LPAA-focused private practice.   Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas that support their aphasia care through a variety of educational materials and resources.   I'm pleased to be today's host for an episode featuring Jasvinder Sekhon. Jas is a speech language pathologist and PhD candidate at La Trobe University in Australia, and recently submitted her thesis. She currently works part time as the senior SLP at a not-for-profit community health organization in Melbourne. Her studies are part of the research program, Optimizing Mental Health and Wellbeing at the Aphasia Center for Research Excellence. She has been involved in the aphasia community in Melbourne for many years, and is a member of the Australian Aphasia Association. She co-convened the first online Australian Aphasia Association national conference in June, 2021.   Today we'll be discussing Jas's research, which focuses on enabling SLPs to feel confident and competent in counseling people with post-stroke aphasia and their families.   In the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast, we've been highlighting the gap areas identified in the State of Aphasia report by Dr. Nina Simmons-Mackie. In this episode, we'll be focusing on Gap Area 8, insufficient attention to depression and low mood across the continuum of care. For more information about the gap areas, you can listen to episode number 62, with Dr. Liz Hoover, or go to the Aphasia Access website.   So Jas, what led you to want to study counseling training for speech language pathologists?   Jasvinder Sekhon Firstly, thank you so much to the listeners and to Lyssa for this opportunity. So my impetus for my PhD arose from observing a range of emotional issues occurring frequently in people with aphasia and their families. My clients had issues such as depression, worry, frustration, low confidence, and distress. And despite my many years of experience in the field, there were many times that I felt inadequate to respond adequately or effectively to my clients' emotions.   So in doing this research, I found that I was not alone. Survey studies of SLP practice and post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation from Australia, the US, UK, and South Africa have found that the majority of speech pathologists feel that they have low knowledge, skills, and confidence to assess or manage emotional and psychological well-being in their clients with post-stroke aphasia—and this includes their families. So working with colleagues on the stroke team who had mental health training, such as psychologists and social workers, I learned many counseling techniques, and also learned about counseling approaches and brief therapies that I thought could be useful for speech pathologists in their work.   As part of my PhD studies, I've also undertaken further reading and some short courses in counseling. And I am privileged to have had the supervision of professors Miranda Rose and Jennifer Oates of La Trobe University, and Professor Ian Kneebone, from University of Technology, Sydney, who have a wealth of professional and research experience in the fields of psychology, stroke, and counseling, and speech-language pathology.     Lyssa Rome So can you tell us about an experience that for you points to the value of incorporating the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia into your clinical work? Jas Jasvinder Sekhon Thanks. Yes. So early in my career, I focused on impairment-level therapies. And I think there's evidence to say that's the area that we are most trained in. But I also felt something was missing. An example was one day a client I was treating in her home, literally sent me packing. After day in, day out, I was focusing on just impairment therapy, which was the comfort area. After she threw me out and after tending to my wounded ego and reflecting, I realized that I had not found out what was meaningful to her and what she wanted out of her rehabilitation. I was being very clinician-directed, and I drove the focus of therapy. She was a busy, active, courageous single mother of two teenage girls and had stuff to do and places to go. And I was not addressing her needs, or her wants, for her to fully participate in her life. And my therapy was not aimed at helping her to achieve these life participation goals.   So since then, I have pursued a holistic, biopsychosocial view of aphasia rehabilitation, and I now spend time to ensure I hear the person's story, understand their needs, wants, and goals from speech therapy, and I collaboratively set out an action plan towards meeting these goals. The assessment and management of psychological well-being is an important part of post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation and comes up often in speech therapy. I have certainly found counseling skills to be essential in my clinical practice.   Lyssa Rome Thank you. I feel like most of us in clinical practice would recognize how common it is for people with aphasia to also be dealing with low mood or anxiety. Certainly I, and I think others, worry at times about whether we're really meeting the emotional needs of the people whom we're working with. I know that there's been some attention to this for years. It seems like increasingly researchers in the aphasia community have been thinking more and more about these issues and recognizing their importance. I know this last summer, and IARC, Linda Worrall's keynote address, and other sessions focused on counseling for people with aphasia. Here in the US, ASHA has a new special interest group that's focused on counseling. And those are just two examples. I think that there are many more. I'm wondering how you see awareness of this issue changing?   Jasvinder Sekhon Yeah, the emotional and psychological issues associated with communication disorders have been well-recognized for decades, as you said, and probably since the establishment of the discipline of SLP. The presence of psychological issues after stroke and aphasia is not new. The need for psychological care in post-stroke aphasia is also not new. I think what is changing is, in awareness, I guess, is who is responsible for providing psychological care in stroke services, how this is done, and when this is provided. This includes describing and defining psychological care, that is within the scope of the stroke team, which includes SLPs, and identifying training or education gaps to fulfill these expected roles, and ensuring that the provision of psychological care is ethical and effective.   Thankfully, we have a model that provides evidence-based guidelines that addresses many of these questions. And this model is the stepped model for psychological care after stroke by the UK Government. Professor Ian Kneebone was part of the group that helped develop the psychological care model. Also, the work by Dr. Caroline Baker in translating the stepped model for post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation, highlighted further evidence for rehabilitation interventions specifically to prevent and treat depression in people with mild or no depression within the scope of speech language pathologists.   Lyssa Rome So can you tell us a little bit more about this stepped model?   Jasvinder Sekhon The stepped model for psychological care is a framework for interdisciplinary psychological care after stroke. The stepped model outlines the role and responsibility for the multidisciplinary team in the assessment and management of emotional and cognitive conditions after stroke. Central to this model is that the whole team take responsibility for the identification and management of psychological issues, with clearly established referral pathways to specialist support services in the case of more severe psychological concerns.   There are four levels of the stepped model, and SLPs have a role and responsibility to support psychological care at level one and level two, for those who are experienced and trained. So at level one, there is no psychological disorder present and it's applicable to most or all stroke survivors. So level two describes stroke survivors with mild and transient psychological issues, and can be addressed by experienced speech language pathologists with adequate training, and who are supported by clinical psychologists or neuropsychologists with special expertise in stroke. At level three, and level four, the assessment and management of psychological issues require specialist psychology staff. So the model actually helps speech-language pathologists define their scope of practice in psychological care, and this includes counseling.   Lyssa Rome So that leads me to wonder about the definition of counseling within speech-language pathology. How would you how should we be thinking about it?   Jasvinder Sekhon Counseling is broadly defined as a purposeful conversation arising from the intention of one person, family, or couple, to reflect on and resolve a problem with the help of another person, and in this instance, the speech-language pathologist, to assist in resolving or progressing that problem. It may be helpful to think of all counseling interventions as methods of learning. All approaches used in counseling are intended to help people change. That is, to help them think differently, to help them feel differently, to help them act differently. In other words, in the case of post-stroke aphasia, counseling aims to help the client progress their goal within their rehabilitation journey.   Lyssa Rome Thank you. That's really helpful, I think, to think about it as ways to think differently, feel differently, act differently. And in service of those goals, and the goal of helping people change, I'm wondering what kinds of psychological interventions can speech-language pathologists be expected to provide?   Jasvinder Sekhon So at level one, emotional and psychological issues are mild and transient and don't impact discipline-specific therapy for example, aphasia therapy. At level one, emotional problems resolve quickly, and speech pathologists, as I mentioned before, definitely can support psychological well-being at this level.   Key interventions at level one, include counseling skills, such as active listening, normalizing the emotions and the experience, building effective relationships, providing psychological advice and information to family and peers to facilitate adjustment and build the skills for self-management and for autonomy with the communication issue. Goal-setting, problem-solving, peer support, motivational interviewing, managing stress, routine assessment and review of mood are also recommended at level one. Enabling peer support and positive relationships, including by providing communication partner training, aphasia choirs, and self-management workbooks are also identified at level one.   Lyssa Rome You've just described a bunch of different kinds of interventions that we as SLPs might be providing. But you also said before that many SLPs don't feel confident to assess and manage psychological well-being very effectively. So I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about that.   Jasvinder Sekhon Yeah, we conducted a systematic review of SLP counseling education in post-stroke aphasia, and found that most universities reported to provide counseling education to SLP students. However, few actually provided counseling education specifically for supporting the psychological well-being in post-stroke aphasia. So it's possible that many speech pathologists may have very little preparation to address the significant emotional and mood issues in people with aphasia after stroke.   We found after speech pathology qualifications, speech pathologists reported a range of counseling education that they received. Some, again, with no training, up to PhD qualifications in counseling. But speech pathologists did report that they received counseling education from working in stroke care—so from their peers in stroke care—and also, many speech pathologists sought further education, professional development, in-services from external sources, counseling courses. So counseling, education and experience, we found, was positively correlated with feeling more knowledgeable, more skilled, and confident for supporting psychological well-being in post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation.   Lyssa Rome With that in mind, and in order to help prepare SLPs to fill that role as you just were describing, you created a counseling education program. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?   Jasvinder Sekhon We designed a counseling education program based on our systematic review of counseling education that speech pathologists currently receive and the stepped model for psychological care after stroke. Our program consisted of seven hours of self-paced learning and it was an online module and a workshop which was three hours, where clinicians practiced their counseling skills with peers. Topics included speech pathologists' role and responsibilities for supporting psychological well-being in post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation within that multidisciplinary team model and within the stepped model for psychological care. We included counseling theory and foundations of counseling skills, and how to apply these to speech pathology practice and specifically to the issues that we were describing common to post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation.   We trialed our counseling education program with 49 practicing speech pathologists in Australia. We measured these outcomes before and after the training program, and also after five weeks of completing the training to see if the effects were maintained. Thankfully, the results of the trial were positive and we did find significant and large effects of the program on speech pathologists' self-efficacy and self-rated competency for counseling in post-stroke aphasia. Also, these effects were maintained at five weeks follow-up for both of the outcomes.   Lyssa Rome That's so exciting. So for those of us who didn't get to participate in your research and who would like to get started now, or would like to brush up on our counseling skills, or deepen our counseling skills, what resources can I and other speech-language pathologists access to help them feel more confident in this area.   Jasvinder Sekhon If you have access to stroke mental health professionals, for example, psychologists or social workers, have a chat with them and organize some training in those level one interventions that were described. Maybe discuss sourcing counseling education from external providers, or your team. Interventions that you could look at sourcing for these inservices could include problem-solving and solution-focused approaches, motivational interviewing, counseling training, foundation counseling skills, for example, behavioral activation, and person-centered counseling. Family sensitive and family therapeutic approaches are also vital and support speech pathologists to provide that level one intervention.   There may be short courses for supporting mental health after stroke available via your National Stroke Association or via ASHA. The new special interest group that you mentioned would also be a fabulous resource for that peer support and professional development. For example, Speech Pathology Australia has teamed up with a local national mental health organization, called Lifeline Australia, to run counseling courses for speech pathologists.   As we have preliminary evidence that our online counseling education program was feasible and effective for improving speech pathologists' confidence for counseling to support psychological well-being in post-stroke aphasia, we are seeking further funding to make this program into a short professional development course for SLPs, and hopefully it will be widely available for anyone who would like to take on this further education.   Lyssa Rome I look forward to that. So when speech-language pathologists are better prepared to address the psychological well-being for our clients who have aphasia, how will our practice look different?   Jasvinder Sekhon It's a great question and a big question. I think ideally, speech pathologists will feel prepared and confident in their role and feel prepared and knowledgeable in their scope of practice in counseling. I think practice guidelines for counseling will be clearer, and clearer in defining scope and boundaries, skills required, and processes for that interdisciplinary practice when addressing the psychological wellbeing of people with aphasia and their families after stroke. Speech pathologists will be able to conduct appropriate screening for social and psychological issues and to know when and how and who to refer to as required.   I think speech pathologists who are appropriately trained will also be able to use a range of counseling skills to support the client to learn communication strategies for participating in conversations relating to all aspects of their lives, as well as strategies for supporting social and psychological well-being. These include strategies for maintaining social networks, building new networks with support from peers, and strategies for coping, adjusting, self-care strategies, and also living well with aphasia. Speech pathologists will also know how to support their own mental health and that of the stroke team members. We also will be able to measure competence for counseling in clinical training and professional practice. This is an area still in its infancy.   I think finally, most importantly, the psychological well-being of people with aphasia and their families will be effectively and efficiently supported from the start of their stroke rehabilitation journey. And risk for mood disorders will be minimized or prevented and positive outcomes enhanced for all domains of health and well-being.   Lyssa Rome I look forward to that day. Jas Sekhon, thank you so much for being our guest on this podcast.   Jasvinder Sekhon It has been my pleasure, Lyssa. Thank you again to Aphasia Access for this opportunity. If anyone has any further questions or comments or would like to find out where things are with our counseling education program, please don't hesitate to contact me via the email, which will be available with this podcast, or through La Trobe University. Thank you again.   Lyssa Rome Great. We'll have that information in the show notes for today's episode. For more information on Aphasia Access and to access our growing library of materials, go to www.aphasiaaccess.org. For a more user-friendly experience, members can sign up for the Aphasia Access Academy, which is free and provides resources searchable by topic or author. If you have an idea for a future podcast series topic, email us at info@ aphasiaaccess.org. Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.     References and Resources Jasvinder Sekhon on Twitter: @holistic_commn Email: J.Sekhon@latrobe.edu.au   Australian Aphasia Association https://aphasia.org.au/   Centre for Research Excellence in Aphasia Recovery and Rehabilitation, La Trobe University https://www.latrobe.edu.au/research/centres/health/aphasia   Lifeline (Australia) https://www.lifeline.org.au/   Psychological Care After Stroke (NHS) https://www.nice.org.uk/media/default/sharedlearning/531_strokepsychologicalsupportfinal.pdf   Speech Pathology Australia https://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/     Baker, C., Worrall, L., Rose, M., Hudson, K., Ryan, B., & O'Byrne, L. (2018). A systematic review of rehabilitation interventions to prevent and treat depression in post-stroke aphasia. Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(16), 1870–1892. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2017.1315181   Baker, C., Worrall, L., Rose, M., & Ryan, B. (2021). Stroke health professionals' management of depression after post-stroke aphasia: A qualitative study. Disability and Rehabilitation, 43(2), 217–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2019.1621394   Doud, A. K., Hoepner, J. K., & Holland, A. L. (2020). A survey of counseling curricula among accredited communication sciences and disorders graduate student programs. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 29(2), 789–803. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00042   Kneebone, I. I. (2016). Stepped psychological care after stroke. Disability and Rehabilitation, 38(18), 1836–1843. https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2015.1107764   National Health Service (NHS), UK. (2011). Psychological care after stroke: improving stroke services for people with cognitive and mood disorders. https://www.nice.org.uk/media/default/sharedlearning/531_strokepsychologicalsupportfinal.pdf   Nash, J., Krüger, E., Vorster, C., Graham, M. A., & Pillay, B. S. (2021). Psychosocial care of people with aphasia: Practices of speech-language pathologists in South Africa. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, ahead-of-print, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2021.1987521   Northcott, S., Simpson, A., Moss, B., Ahmed, N., & Hilari, K. (2017). How do speech-and-language therapists address the psychosocial well-being of people with aphasia? Results of a UK online survey. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 52(3), 356–373. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12278   Parkinson, K. & Rae, J., P. (1996). The Understanding and Use of Counselling by Speech and Language Therapists at Different Levels of Experience. European Journal of Disorders of Communication, 31(2), 140–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-6984.1995.tb01757.x   Sekhon, J., Douglas, J., & Rose, M. (2015). Current Australian speech-language pathology practice in addressing psychological well-being in people with aphasia after stroke. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 17(3), 252–262. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1024170   Sekhon, J. K., Oates, J., Kneebone, I., & Rose, M. (2019). Counselling training for speech–language therapists working with people affected by post‐stroke aphasia: A systematic review. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 54(3), 321-346. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12455   Sekhon, J. K., Oates, J., Kneebone, I., & Rose, M. L. (2021). Counselling education for speech-language pathology students in Australia: A survey of education in post-stroke aphasia. Aphasiology, ahead-of-print, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2021.1967280   Victorino, K. R., & Hinkle, M. S. (2019). The development of a self-efficacy measurement tool for counseling in speech-language pathology. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 28(1), 108–120. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_AJSLP-18-0012

In the November 2022 news update, we cover:- Early analysis of the Chancellor's autumn budget statement.- Issues around the four nations of the UK.- The second anniversary of the Communication Access project.- Reminder for members to complete their profile for the 'Horizon project'.Resources:- Sign up for the Communication Access training: communication-access.co.uk/- Members please login to the RCSLT website to complete your profile for the Horizon project: www.rcslt.org/This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

Communication is a major component of children's social and emotional learning and development… but some children experience persistent challenges with one or more elements that are necessary for successful verbal communication… and then they can spiral into frustration, or negative self-image, or retreat into various forms of social isolation... so I know this conversation will be valuable for learning some of the many, many ways in which Speech and Language Therapists can help alleviate, or at least greatly reduce, major challenges and frustrations some kids experience with speech impediments, delayed speech, inadequate vocabulary, even listening skills, development of neuronal pathways related to speech, and so much more. You can reach Rona, via email: rroweintraub@earthlink.net A couple of Google searches related to Speech and Language Therapists/Pathologists: https://www.asha.org/public/who-are-speech-language-pathologists/ https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=speech+pathologist&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nini-white/message

Welcome back to Of Primary Importance! In this podcast series we are exploring all things EYFS and primary with different topics and special guests each fortnight.  In this episode, I am joined by Ellise Hayward to talk about ‘Empowering students with physical disabilities.' Ellise is a motivational speaker, AAC mentor, and an advocate for SEND and Inclusion. She is currently studying Health & Social Care at College. Ellise has cerebral palsy and is passionate about sharing her experiences to raise awareness and empower others with physical disabilities. “My name is Ellise and I happen to have cerebral palsy. I've always been very accepting of my disability, always try to look on the positive side, and always try my best in everything. I'm a strong-minded person and do anything I want to do. My disability isn't a barrier, I'll always find a way, I'm forever pushing myself to be the best version of myself. Even though it might take me longer, I get there eventually. I'm a motivational speaker and an AAC mentor. I speak to schools, colleges and universities about my life and my own personal experiences. I'm very passionate about spreading awareness of cerebral palsy and inclusive behaviours. In the last year, I have spoken to University of London and University of Plymouth students who are training to be Speech and Language Therapists and SENDCos. I was also a guest speaker at the Somerset SENCo conference in 2019. I have given whole school staff online CPD sessions.”Here are some of the questions I asked Ellise: You have had quite an amazing communication journey, could you tell us about that? What were your experiences like at school?How did your family feel about your education?You are at college now, how does your education experience differ now?What have been some of your challenges growing up and how have you overcome them?You are very passionate about speaking about your cerebral palsycould you tell us why you are so passionate about this and who you work with on this?Ellise, you are so inspirational and have achieved so much- what have been some of your highlights? You have always been determined to not let anything stop you, so I'm wondering what are your ambitions and what is next for you? What are your top tips for someone working with a student with a physical disability?What would you want someone with a physical disability to hear right now?    You can follow Ellise on Twitter at @Ellise_Hayward_ and on LinkedIn at  Ellise Hayward.  You can also check out her flow page for more ways to get in touch and to see her motivational videos. You can follow me (Kat Cauchi) on Twitter at @ReallyschoolK Check out #OPIP and #OfPrimaryImportance for more content.  If you are interested on coming on the show or have a topic suggestion, send me a DM!   Kat Cauchi is the Product Manager of ReallySchool and the Editor of R.I.S.E. Magazine. She is also a former Primary School Teacher, Member of the Global Equality Collective,Technocamps GiST Role Model, and Global Ed

In the October 2022 news update, we cover:- An overview of where things are on right now.- The new Horizon member profile project.- Key issues in politics right now.- Events for November and December. (See www.rcslt.org/events/ for details.)This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Cara McDonagh, Director of Engagement and Communications.

In the September 2022 news update, we cover:- The new PM; the passing of The Queen; the accession of The King.- The Health and Social Care Secretary of State, Thérèse Coffey, and what that might mean for speech and language therapy.- Key work including 'streamlining' in Wales; the school bill in the UK parliament; and acknowledgement of just how tough it is out there.This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

August 2022's news catch up covers:- Review of SEND in England and six themes for our asks- Wider issues around crisis in children's services - across the UK- Mental health DHSC 10 year plan- Guidance on domestic abuse in England- Covid public inquiries- CAUK and wider communication access issues- Welsh language health and social care plan- Neurodevelopmental whole system approach in Wales- Scotland national care serviceProduction notes:This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.Useful links:Response to SEND green paper: www.rcslt.org/news/getting-it-ri…-send-green-paper/Communication Access project: www.rcslt.org/policy/uk-wide/#section-News: www.rcslt.org/news/

In the July 2022 news update, we cover:- Impact of ministerial changes in Parliament- Integrated Care System updates- Workforce pipeline and transformation- Covid latest- Update on research and outcomesThis interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT and Judith Broll, Director of Professional Development.Useful links:What you need to know about Integrated Care Systems (England): https://www.rcslt.org/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-integrated-care-systems/Workforce reform programme: https://www.rcslt.org/members/get-involved/current-rcslt-projects/workforce-reform-programme/Owning outcomes: outcome measurement to deliver quality services: event presentations: https://www.rcslt.org/events/owning-outcomes-outcome-measurement-to-deliver-quality-services/

In this podcast we chat with Rebecca Waring, one of the authors of a paper looking at the differences between phonological delay and phonological disorder and how the disorder is linked to executive function.The paper is:Differentiating phonological delay from phonological disorder: executive function performance in preschoolersRebecca Waring,Susan Rickard Liow,Barbara Dodd,Patricia EadieFirst published:  21 January 2022Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1460-6984.12694 Useful resources:CLAESSEN, M., LEITÃO, S., and FRASER, C-J., 2017, Intervention for a young child with atypical phonology. In B. Dodd and A. Morgan (Eds.). Intervention Case Studies of Child Speech Impairment (pp. 275–291). Surrey, England: J&R Press.CROSBIE, S., HOLM, A., and DODD, B., 2009, Cognitive flexibility in children with and without speech Disorder. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 25 (2), 250-270.DODD, B., 2011, Differentiating speech delay from speech disorder: Does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders, 31, 96-111. JACQUES, S. and ZELAZO, P.D., 2001, The flexible item selection task (FIST): A measure of executive function in pre-schoolers. Developmental Neuropsychology, 20(3), 573-591.NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In the May 2022 news update, we cover:- The Health and Care Strategy implementation- Integrated Care System updates- Messenger review- SEND survey- UN conference- Children's listening event- RCSLT in the news- and so, so much more!This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

This is the second in a series of episodes which we will be releasing in 2022 which will look at anti-racism in the speech and language therapy profession. In this episode leaders of the network group 'SLTs of Colour' (Angela Whiteley, Heeral Davda and Dorett Davis) chat with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' chair, Mary Heritage, and consultant Kiki Maurey OBE MBA. In 2020 RCSLT commissioned Kiki to undertake an independent review of how it might move towards a more diverse board.  In this episode we look at what Kiki's findings and recommendations and what RCSLT is doing and has done in response. There is a link to the report and actions in the Useful links below. About SLTs of Colour:SLTs of Colour is an inclusive network supporting Speech & Language Therapists in the UK, posting SLT profiles on Instagram. Find SLTs of Colour on Twitter and Instagram:SLTs of Colour TwitterSLTs of Colour InstagramUseful links from RCSLT:An update on the RCSLT's committment to anti-racism and equality, diversity and inclusion and our work so far, including a link to Kiki Maurey's report: https://www.rcslt.org/news/progressing-our-work-on-equality-diversity-and-inclusion/​​​​ Anti-racism in speech and language therapy: part 1: Listen here  https://www.buzzsprout.com/1211822/episodes/9699091 or or via your favourite podcast app.Raising concerns about racism: advice for members: https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/raising-concerns-about-racism-advice-for-members/ Note that this is open-access.RCSLT anti-racism updates:https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/updates/ Ida B. Wells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells The Hill we Climb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdKdyemxbewThe interview was produced by Jacques Strauss, freelance digital producer.

In the May 2022 news update, we cover:- Key inclusions in the Queen's speech.- Events in Northern Ireland.- Welsh government programme for transforming and modernising care and reducing waiting lists.- SEND reform in England.- Implementation of the Health and Care Act including ICS plans and a name change.- Plus lots more - it's a busy month!This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the RCSLT.

In this podcast we interview Amy Connery, one of the authors of a paper that aims to build stakeholder consensus on the core components of intervention for adults who stutter, and to establish a guiding framework for the design and development of evidence-based interventions for adults who stutter.The paper is:Obtaining consensus on core components of stuttering intervention for adults: An e-Delphi Survey with key stakeholdersAmy Connery, J. Scott Yaruss, Holly Lomheim, Torrey M. Loucks, Rose Galvin, Arlene McCurtinFirst published:  24 November 2021Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12680NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In the March 2022 news update, we discuss:- Response to the government's 'Road to Recovery' plans.- 'Equity for all' report in Scotland.- AHP event in Northern Ireland.- Swallow Awareness Day 2022.- And much more!This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn,Release date:16 March 2022

Ear, Nose and Throat  (ENT) services have a two week window in which they must see people presenting with symptoms which might indicate cancer. The pressure on these services has grown hugely since the pandemic and now we need novel approaches to help reduce the backlog and improve the experience for patients.In this episode of our series on papers from the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders we chat with Louise Occomore-Kent, speech and language therapist (SLT), about ways in which SLTs might support with increased pressure on Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) pathway services.  Louise, and fellow researchers, Ellie Hatch and Madeline Cruice, explored SLTs' views of extending their role to work with patients referred on the ENT two week wait pathway, to speed up diagnosis for those who are found to have cancer and to provide a pathway for the majority who do not have cancer, but still have issues which need to be addressed.The paper is:Scoping opinion: Speech and language therapists' views on extending their role to the urgent ear, nose and throat pathway.Louise C. Occomore-Kent,Ellie Hatch,Madeline CruiceFirst published: 26 July 2021Access the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1460-6984.12650 NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In February's update we cover:- Progress of the Health Bill in the House of Lords (England)- Consultation on regulation of professional bodies (UK wide)- Down Syndrome Bill (England)- British Sign Language bill (England)- Northern Ireland Assembly and implications of departure of the first minister (Northern Ireland)- Senedd work on hospital discharge and patient flow (Wales)-  RCSLT reports on long Covid and sustained impact from Covid:  https://www.rcslt.org/news/long-covid-and-sustained-impact-reports/This interview is conducted by Mark Singleton, Learning Officer at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at RCSLT,

In the January 2022 news update, we discuss:- Discuss some of the big issues for 2022 including impact of Covid-19 but also key parts of the RCSLT's new vision- Health and Care Bill (England) at Lords Committee stage- Regulation consultation- AHP strategy- Updates from Wales- RCSLT's professional network on workforce issues (access here for RCSLT members only: community.rcslt.org/s/group/Collabo…0Y000006IPl9UAG)- Policy and public affairs team impact report: www.rcslt.org/policy/uk-wide/This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn,Release date:18 January 2022

Kicking off a new year with our first episode of Season 4 with a very special guest! Jane Fraser, FRCSLT, President of Stuttering Foundation , joins Sara MacIntyre, M.A., CCC-SLP to share the history of Stuttering Foundation in honor of the 75th Anniversary this year. Ms. Fraser shares early memories of her father, discusses his relationship with his stuttering, the beginnings and evolution of Stuttering Foundation, memories from the first workshops with the 'Stuttering Greats,' and finally, what she think her father would be most proud of.For more information on the History of Stuttering Foundation, "How One Person Can Make a Difference."For episode suggestions/ comments: smacintyre@stutteringhelp.org. Bio: Jane Fraser, Hon. FRCSLT, serves as the president of The Stuttering Foundation of America, a position she has held since 1981. The oldest and largest nonprofit organization for the prevention and treatment of stuttering, the Foundation has grown tremendously in size, scope and outreach under her leadership and direction. The daughter of Stuttering Foundation founder Malcolm Fraser, Ms. Fraser received a degree in Russian and Linguistics at Bryn Mawr College and continued graduate work in both subjects at the Universite de Strasbourg, France. As an avid student of language and speech, Ms. Fraser is fluent in French and lived in that country for 20 years. An experienced editor, translator, and interpreter, she previously worked for the Institut Gustave Roussy and for the Assemblee Nationale in Paris.Among her many professional affiliations, Ms. Fraser lists: Member, NIDCD Advisory Council of the National Institutes (1996-2000); Vice President, Action for Stammering Children in London; President, The Malcolm Fraser Foundation; Member, Societe Francaise de Phoniatrie; and Member, International Association of Logopaedics and Phoniatrics. Other affiliations: Member, Advisory Council, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (1996-2000); Member, Board of Trustees, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York (1991-1997); Board member, The Orianne Society; Co-Chairman, Regional Campaigns, Hamilton College; Co-Chairman, Parents Association, Pitzer College, Claremont, California; Board Member, National Association for Hearing and Speech Action (1984-1987); Member, Board of Trustees of The Alexander Hamilton Institute.Personal honors and awards include a past Carnegie Foundation grant for Russian studies in Russia and the Distinguished Alumnae of the Century Award, Hutchison School Centennial, 2002; the Outstanding Contribution Award from the International Stuttering Association at their World Congress in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on May 9, 2007; was chosen Nonprofit Executive of the Year by the Nonprofit Times in 2008. On Sept. 17, 2014, she received an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists for her distinguished service in promoting the profession of speech and language therapy.Personal honors and awards include: Distinguished Alumnae of the Century Award, Hutchison School Centennial, 2002; the Outstanding Contribution Award from the International Stuttering Association, 2007. She was chosen Nonprofit Executive of the Year by the Nonprofit Times in 2008. 

Rehabilitation Therapies Physical Therapists: Laura French and Joyce Kost Our interdisciplinary team of physical, occupational and speech therapists work closely with our patients to restore maximum function and independence. We work with your physician on a plan of recovery that is right for you, and enable you to progress in the comfort of your home. Physical Therapists help patients to improve strength, balance and endurance following illness, injury or orthopedic surgery. Orthopedic Care is physical therapy that is frequently prescribed for patients recovering from back or joint surgery to help them regain flexibility and stability. Often a pre-operative physical therapy program can speed post-operative recovery. Occupational Therapists assist patients who need help with the ability to perform the daily activities of life after injury or illness. Therapists work with patients on tasks such as improving fine motor skills, using assistive devices for dressing, bathing, cooking and learning sequencing techniques for correctly taking medications. Speech and Language Therapists help people who may have difficulty with chewing, swallowing, or problems relating to communication disorders, such as aphasia, dysphasia and voice control. Our therapist can also help with problems related to memory loss and dementia. Explore the possibility of rehabilitation in the comfort and privacy of your own home. Contact us today to learn more. The Latest News from Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Litchfield County We are excited to announce that Foothills Visiting Nurse & Home Care (Est. 1922), VNA Northwest (Est. 1928), and Salisbury Visiting Nurse Association (Est. 1904) have joined forces and merged to form a new agency, Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Litchfield County. All three agencies have been caring for the residents of Litchfield County for a century or more. READ MORE Read the latest newsletter from Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Litchfield County Below you will find resources related to COVID-19: CDC COVID19 UpdateConnecticut COVID-19 ResponseFind a Vaccine Near You Why get vaccinated? To protect yourself, your family, your coworkers, and your community! Click here for details Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Litchfield County was established by the joining of forces of Foothills Visiting Nurse and Home Care (Est. 1922), VNA Northwest (Est. 1928) and Salisbury Visiting Nurse Association (Est. 1904). Our mission is to provide the best home health, hospice, and preventive care for the residents of Litchfield County and beyond. We are your local Home Health & Hospice Agency providing care 24/7. Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Litchfield County is a voluntary non-profit organization governed by a Board of Directors representing the towns we primarily serve. It is licensed by the State of Connecticut Department of Public Health and certified by Medicare.

This is the first in a series of episodes which we will be releasing in 2022 which will look at anti-racism in the speech and language therapy profession. In this episode leaders of the network group 'SLTs of Colour' (Angela Whiteley, Heeral Davda and Dorett Davis) chat with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' chair, Mary Heritage, about the need for anti-racism awareness in the profession and the ways this is being taken forwards.About SLTs of Colour:SLTs of Colour is an inclusive network supporting Speech & Language Therapists in the UK, posting SLT profiles on Instagram. Find SLTs of Colour on Twitter and Instagram:SLTs of Colour TwitterSLTs of Colour InstagramUseful links from RCSLT:Raising concerns about racism: advice for members: https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/raising-concerns-about-racism-advice-for-members/ Note that this is open-access.Anti-racism in speech and language therapy – programme of learning: https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/programme-of-learning/#section-2 Starting conversations in your workplace (toolkit):https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/programme-of-learning/#section-3 RCSLT anti-racism updates:https://www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity-inclusion-and-anti-racism/updates/ The interview was produced by Jacques Strauss, freelance digital producer. 

In December's news update, we:- Take a look back at 2021- Consider the challenges for 2022- Talk about health and social care in Northern Ireland- Discuss the upcoming Northern Ireland elections and manifesto asks- Think about our ambitions for the speech and language therapy profession and those speech and language therapists serve for 2022.This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, RCSLT's Director of Policy and Public Affairs and Ruth Sedgewick, RCSLT's Head of Northern Ireland Office.

We're discussing Long Covid and its effects on speaking and singing.Our guest is highly specialist speech and language therapist, singer and singing teacher Carrie Garrett.Symptoms of Long Covid (it's a looong list!)How singing teachers can support students with Long CovidThe difference between Long Covid and post-Covid syndromeTypes of vocal exercises that are useful for Long Covid supportDifferences between Long Covid and chronic conditions such as COPD or asthmaAnd a poem (with permission) from Michael Rosen on working with a voice therapist post-CovidResources mentioned in the show:Michael Rosen's BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth episode with Fiona Gillies  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000vp3yThe One Minute Voice Warmup App (Apple and Android) from Vocal ProcessMy Singer Has A Voice Problem (course) in the Vocal Process Learning Lounge https://bit.ly/VocalProcessLearningLounge Ask us anything - submit your questions on https://speakpipe.com/Vocalprocess British Medical Journal https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/02/19/we-need-to-do-more-to-understand-chronic-vocal-symptoms-of-covid-19/Allied Health Professionals webinar - Long Covid Speech and Language Therapists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olKyibwGiXcNHS England National guidance for post-COVID syndrome assessment clinics https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/publication/national-guidance-for-post-covid-syndrome-assessment-clinics/NHS Supporting your recovery after Covid19 www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk British Lung Foundation www.blf.org.ukNHS Voice problems after Covid19 with Paul John McKenna https://youtu.be/Y9QqYuHhSkI

Find out exactly how your speech therapists should be supporting your child in early years, how to get the right support, and what to do to find a way forward for your child if things aren't going the way you had hoped. Speech and language therapy is about so much more than just verbal speech. Your therapist should not only be able to support you in sound production, but in vocabulary development, reading, signing, feeding, social interactions, behaviour management…….the list goes on!! Our hosts Nisha & Hamel speak to the lovely Leela Baksi from Symbol and talk all things SALT (speech and language therapy). Symbol has one of the largest teams of Speech and Language Therapists in the UK offering specialist assessment, intervention, training and consultancy for children and adults with special needs. In addition, Symbol also employs Social Workers, Clinical Psychologists, Occupational Therapists, Behavioural Therapists supporting those with learning disabilities in a multitude of ways.

The RCSLT news podcast for November 2021 includes:- BuildBackBetterSLT petition response from the Government- What the Spending Review means for speech and language therapy in England- RCSLT health inequalities work recognised by the Royal Society for Public Health www.rcslt.org/learning/diversity…alth-inequalities/- Communication Access birthday communication-access.co.uk/#- and much moreThis interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and features Derek Munn, RCSLT's Director of Policy and Public Affairs.

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) is associated with growth deficits and neurodevelopmental impairment including foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Difficulties with oral and written communication skills are common among children with PAE; however, less is known about how communication skills of adolescents who have PAE compare with those who do not. Adolescence is a critical time for development, supporting the transition into adulthood, but it is considered a high-risk period for those with FASD.The paper is:Oral and written communication skills of adolescents with prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) compared with those with no/low PAE: A systematic reviewAccess the paper here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12644  Natalie R. Kippin, Suze Leitão, Rochelle Watkins, Amy Finlay-JonesUseful links:https://www.nofasd.org.au/https://www.fasdhub.org.au/ https://nationalfasd.org.uk/https://www.adoptionuk.org/fasd-hubNOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

This month's catch up covers three main areas:- Updates to Covid and how members can get support https://www.rcslt.org/learning/covid-19/- What to look forward to in this year's RCSLT conferencehttps://www.rcslt.org/events/rcslt-conference-2021/- Campaigns including the upcoming anniversary of the launch of the CAUK training and DLD awareness day  https://www.rcslt.org/policy/uk-wide/#section-3 https://www.rcslt.org/members/clinical-guidance/developmental-language-disorder/- and much moreThis interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In this IJLCD episode we interview Charlie Strutt and Ghada Khattab about their paper in the IJLCD: 'Does the duration and frequency of dummy (pacifier) use affect the development of speech?'The current literature suggests a link between dummy (or pacifier) use and a number of both positive and detrimental consequences. Positive consequences include soothing effect and protection from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), while negative ones include increased risk of otitis media and dental malformation. However, there is little research surrounding the impact of dummy use on the development of speech sounds.The paper is:Does the duration and frequency of dummy (pacifier) use affect the development of speech?Access the paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12605 NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here.  Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'.The interview is conducted by Amit Kulkarni, Head of Research and Outcomes at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

This month's catch up covers a large span of work:- Breaking news on the Build Back Better petition to Parliament for speech and language therapy funding (Campaign: www.rcslt.org/get-involved/build…es-after-covid-19/ ) (Petition: www.tinyurl.com/SLTBBB)- Covid and long Covid developments- Neurodiversity in prisons in England- NHS reform in England second reading in Parliament- Mental health reform in Northern Ireland- Race equality action plan in WalesThis interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In this IJLCD episode Professor James Law and Dr. Jenna Charlton discuss the findings of their rapid review of the use of telepractice in paediatric speech & language therapy. Their paper is:'Tele-practice for children and young people with communication disabilities: Employing the COM-B model to review the intervention literature and inform guidance for practitioners'Access the paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12592  NOTES:For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods' collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website'. Resources:RCSLT guidance re telehealth https://www.rcslt.org/members/delivering-quality-services/telehealth/telehealth-guidance/#section-1 Joint ESLA/ReSNetSLT tweetchat/webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxpgtQ9Lw7E IJLCD virtual issue on remote and technology enhanced SLT practice https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1460-6984.remote.technology.enhanced The interview is conducted by Amit Kulkarni, Head of Research and Outcomes at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

June news from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Covering:- Build back better campaign and petition (Campaign: www.rcslt.org/get-involved/build…es-after-covid-19/ ) (Petition: www.tinyurl.com/SLTBBB)- Strategic plan work- Follow up on Scottish and Welsh elections- Communication Access project update (Elearning here: communication-access.co.uk/)- What else is hot right nowThis interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In this episode, you'll hear two perspectives on children's speech and language. Speech and language therapist Anna Sellers, who works with children in schools, and Derek Munn, director of policy and public affairs at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, talk about the impact of the pandemic – both negative and positive – on services for young people. They also share their thoughts on what school leaders can do to help tackle the challenges that lie ahead around speech and language support in schools. Find out more about the work of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists: www.rcslt.org.

Can a student's vocabulary impact on their ability to learn? In this episode of The Talking DLD Podcast we are talking vocabulary. Our special guests are Stephen Parsons & Anna Branagan, Speech and Language Therapists, trainers and co-authors of resources ‘Language for Thinking', ‘Word Aware' (primary and Early Years) and ‘Language for Behaviour and Emotions.'  Tune into Vocabulary & DLD | Episode 5 Season 2 of The Talking DLD Podcast to hear classroom strategies for increasing learning and what families can do at home to help students with DLD grow their vocabulary. To learn more about DLD head to thedldproject.com.  

In this episode Jan and Helen speak to Amy and Alex, Speech and Language Therapists in NHS Tayside. We chat about the highs and lows of working with the brain injury caseload, how we as therapists can support one another, and the thinking behind Words of the Week. If you've not signed up to Words of the Week, information can be found here: https://www.nhstayside.scot.nhs.uk/OurServicesA-Z/AdultAcquiredSpeechandLanguageTherapy/PROD_314107/index.htm We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the podcast, find us on social media via @BrainySLT on Twitter and @brainyspeechtherapists on Instagram. 

RCSLT news May 2021: inc Build Back Better campaign; election results; Covid pandemic to endemic; Queens' Speech; anti-racism; mental health.The new - free - elearning mentioned in the interview is called 'Mind Your Words' and it is designed to support those working with children and young people with mental health needs. It aims to improve understanding of children and young people who have both mental health needs – or social emotional and mental health needs (SEMH) – and speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). To access the elearning please head here:https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/course/view.php?id=16This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In this IJLCD episode, we talk to Richard Cave, who works with the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MND), about an article he’s written on voice banking. Voice banking is a process in which people who suffer from MND or other conditions are given the opportunity to record their own synthetic voices for use with an AAC device in the future.   IJLCD (Wiley link): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1460-6984.12588For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods’ collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website’ MND: https://www.mndassociation.org/ RCSLT pages on voice banking:https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/clinical-information/voice-banking/ You can follow Richard on Twitter (@speedoftrust27) to get more information about free Voice Banking training sessions for SLTs who may be interested in this exciting technology.  The interview is conducted by Amit Kulkarni, Head of Research and Outcomes at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Listen for the latest on RCSLT's recent service user survey of speech and language therapy provision during the pandemic and the Building Back Better report which it prompted (see more here: https://www.rcslt.org/get-involved/building-back-better-speech-and-language-therapy-services-after-covid-19/) Hear the latest on how Covid is impacting on waiting lists; the case for better ventilation of enclosed spaces; and clear masks.Plus more on NHS reform in England and a win in the House of Lords on the Domestic Abuse Bill.This interview is conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In this Podcast Sian talks with Speech and Language Therapists Helen Maclean and Jan McIntosh-Brown from the West Coast of Scotland about working together with patients with brain injuries.

Transcript Potty-training, teething, learning to ride a bike: some children are quick to reach each of these milestones, whereas others are much slower. The differences between children can be huge, and such differences also exist when it comes language development. But how do you know when your child's progress in learning a language really is too slow? What should you do as a parent or teacher of a bilingual child, if you're worried about his or her language development in one of their two languages, or perhaps even in both? At what point is it wise to contact a professional such as a speech language therapist? And if you are such a professional, what is the best way of approaching assessment in bilingual children?  You often hear that bilingual children are slower to learn their two languages than monolingual children. People refer to this as a language delay. Language delay is used in different ways by different people and so it's not always clear what this term means. Often times, language delay is used to refer to a child who is lagging behind in his or her language development in the language used at school (so Dutch in the Netherlands, English in the UK, etc.). For bilingual children, this may be due to the fact that - because they're learning two languages at the same time - they have less contact with the school language than their monolingual peers. At the same time, having a language delay can also mean that something else is going on, namely that the child has what's called a developmental language disorder, often abbreviated to DLD. DLD is a condition which affects one in fifteen children and is just as common in monolingual children as it is in bilinguals.  In this episode of Kletsheads we talk to Sean Pert, speech language therapist and researcher, about language delay and DLD. We learn that if a bilingual child has DLD, this will be visible in both their languages. This means that DLD is not simply the same as being unable to speak the school language well. We learn what the characteristics of DLD are, what to do as a parent if you think your child might have DLD, and what to pay attention to when diagnosing DLD in bilingual children. Our Kletshead of the week is the brillliant Naia and in Let's Klets we talk to an educational consultant about five simple steps in include multilingualism in the classroom. Dr. Sean Pert is Senior Lecturer and Consultant Speech and Language Therapist at the University of Manchester in the UK. He has over 25 years of clinical experience and has worked on home language interventions for bilingual children in the UK speaking Pakistani heritage (Mirpuri, Punjabi and Urdu), Bangladeshi heritage (Sylheti) and Polish languages. As discussed in the podcast, Sean was involved in writing the the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' Clinical Guidelines on Bilingualism.  Mari Varsányi was born in Budapest, Hungary and now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She works as an educational consultant and trainer at human-ed (www.human-ed.org), working in the field of intercultural and inclusive education. Mari's five steps to making space for multilingualism are discussed in detail (along with photos) in this blog post and you can download the activities from step 3 (as part of a whole portfolio) on her webiste. Mari is also the mother of a trilingual (Hungarian-Hebrew-Dutch) 3-year-old, and she appeared in an earlier episode of Kletsheads, where she helped us review books about raising bilingual children.  If you're in the Netherlands, you might also be interested in the Dutch bilingual speech and language therapy association, where you can find a map showing where to find speech language therapists who areable to assess children in languages other than Dutch. If you understand Dutch, hop over to the Dutch edition of the podcast, where we also have an episode on taalachterstandand bilingualism.