Advances in Communication and Swallowing

To determine how confident final-year speech and language therapy (SLT) students feel regarding provision of intervention to youth offenders with communication disorders. This project looked specifically at confidence assessing adolescents, providing intervention to adolescents, and providing intervention to youth offenders.

A cohort of 23 final-year SLT students completed a questionnaire comprised of Likert and open-ended questions.

Only 17% of the participants felt confident providing intervention to youth offenders with communication disorders; 70% of the participants felt confident assessing adolescents with communication disorders; while 53% felt confident providing intervention to adolescents. However, when specific areas of assessment and intervention were considered, there were gaps in confidence, including knowledge of typical adolescent communication development, provision of intervention for adolescent dysfluency and management of challenging behaviours.

Final-year SLT students have much of the basic knowledge required to help youth offenders develop communication skills; however, most do not feel confident providing intervention to youth offenders with communication disorders. Undergraduate workshops and continuing professional development courses may facilitate transference of underlying skills to the provision of intervention to youth offenders with communication disorders.

Various methods for the collection of aphasic discourse samples, including single and sequential picture description, storytelling, interactive conversation and monologic recounts, have been reported. The first aim of this study is to examine the cultural appropriateness of the Main Concept Analysis (MCA; Kong, 2009), a discourse analysis developed for Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, for the Irish population. The second aim is to provide preliminary evidence on the clinical applicability of the tool. A case study of using the MCA to assess an Irish-English (IE) speaker with aphasia and a control speaker is presented.

Five therapists, who were native IE speakers, were recruited to comment on whether the MCA pictures and scoring criteria were culturally appropriate to the Irish population. The MCA was piloted on six typical native IE speakers and the modified MCA was used to assess one participant with Broca’s aphasia and a matched control to evaluate their performance differences.

The MCA was considered to be culturally appropriate to the Irish population. Preliminary results of the case study indicated that it could differentiate between normal and aphasic discourse production.

Future extension should recruit a larger number of participants and should establish reliability and validity of the MCA.

The study aimed to explore parents’ perspectives of an autism diagnostic service in Ireland.

A qualitative research design was chosen for the study. Eleven parents of children with autism spectrum disorders took part in semistructured interviews. They talked about their experiences and perceptions of the service they received. The data was analyzed using the framework approach.

Parents expressed satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the service. Parents expressed satisfaction with the time taken to receive a diagnosis and the age at which the diagnosis was made. However, parents expressed dissatisfaction with the location of the disclosure interview, lack of information, lack of support following the diagnosis and with the disjointed nature of services.

The findings provide evidence to prove that parental satisfaction would be increased by improvements in the diagnostic process such as providing counselling support through the diagnostic process and following the diagnosis, increasing collaboration between professionals, reducing the length of the process and involving parents in the process to facilitate their understanding and awareness. This study provides an example of giving parents a voice to inform changes in practice and to understand parents’ perspectives of a service in the Irish context.