Goals and therapy options

Identify and describe the area of difficulty accurately

When you are thinking about interventions, make sure that you understand what the speech, language, communication or swallowing difficulty is and what your options are.

In order to ensure best practice, you need to understand the nature of the difficulty, and what options there are for therapy.

Certain medical diagnoses are associated with speech, language, communication or swallowing difficulties. However, the severity and area of difficulty differs between individuals. This makes it important to conduct formal and/or informal testing (as clinically indicated) and hold discussions with the service user to ascertain the areas of concern and preferred areas to target in therapy.

Once the goal is identified, and appropriate goals are formulated, the SLT, client and their family/carers need to know what their therapy options are.
Some decisions need to be made by groups of people, for example, if the difficulty lies in eating and drinking, therapy decisions may need to also involve the dietician, ENT doctor and/or consultant physician. For these decisions, the people involved need to first make sure they understand what the problem is and how important it is. Then they need to know what treatments (options) there are for the problem.

REMEMBER: Make sure that you understand what the area of difficulty is, and what your options are.