This is the third of a three-part Q&A series highlighting audiologists and speech-language pathologists.
Every May, we like to highlight the hardworking audiologists and speech-language pathologists we have on campus here at Salus in our clinical facilities – the Pennsylvania Ear Institute and the Speech-Language Institute – and in our programs. They provide life-altering treatment and raise awareness about communication disorders.
Here’s a Q & A with Robert Serianni, MS, CCC-SLP, FNAP, chair/program director, Speech-Language Pathology, to learn more about Better Hearing and Speech Month.
Q: Speech-Language Pathology as a field is growing rapidly, correct?
A: Absolutely. One of the areas we do see growth is the area of telepractice. We will be housed in a more urban area like Philadelphia, but we'll remote into an office or a school in a more rural area that doesn't have as good accessibility to services. So as long as there's someone on the other end with a good computer and audio and video channels, and someone to help the family sort of maneuver through the technology, telepractice or telehealth might be a way for individuals that don't have immediate access or closer access to be able to gain those opportunities. The nice thing is that Salus is enveloping those skills in their graduate program, so our SLP students are going to have the opportunity to practice those skills before they become clinicians in the field.
Q: That's really great.
A: I think as technology gets better and better, we're going to see the ability to have practitioners across health settings and education settings are able to use that technology to work with students and clients and patients in all their areas. Sort of an area where I've been able to work with technology is with radiologists. A skill that speech pathologists have is a video swallow study. We go into the x-ray suite and we take radiographic pictures and videos as a patient swallows, and we need a radiologist to interpret those studies with us, with speech pathologists. Sometimes the radiologist isn't there in the hospital with us, they're somewhere else, and they look at the pictures and the videos and they send their interpretations to the hospital - that sort of remote access allows radiology to be a 24/7 service. The hospital doesn't have to have a radiologist on site all the time. They need technologists to maneuver the cameras and to take the still radiographs, but to have them physically on site isn't necessary.
Q: That's a huge stride forward. So can you talk about some of the support groups at SLI that facilitate communication across the lifespan?
A: That's actually one of my favorite topics, because I think especially from the practicing clinician side, these groups are so infrequently done in the community because they're not billable and there's no reimbursement for them, so you have to have agencies and clinicians that are really dedicated to addressing all the needs of the individual and not just the billable needs of an individual. Giving students the opportunities to look at a client outside of the treatment room I think is a really important way to give them the full complement of how a communication disorder impacts their lives.
We have support groups for parents and kids who stutter - the children have stuttering issues and the parents want to be supportive. It's difficult and they want to push, but how hard to push? We work with them in a support group setting, and the kids who stutter get to meet other kids who stutter and share those sorts of social aspects, and, "Hey, I'm not alone," and I think there's empowerment in that.
Q: Yes, communication can only be done between two people really, or more than two people.
A: Right. Another group that I'm really excited to see launch is our dementia support group. Caregivers that provide care to individuals that have dementia really feel isolated, because an individual with dementia needs to be monitored at all points. So it's hard for them to go out into the community and get support because then they have to worry about, "Well, who's going to watch my loved one while I'm out?"
Salus has developed a two-track program where we're going to do a group activity with the individuals that have dementia around a treatment philosophy called reminiscing therapy. Basically you spend a lot of time talking about things from the old days. I'm realizing as I get older, the old days are kind of creeping up on me. But we will talk about things like World War II and music of the era and politics of the era. People with dementia tend to hold onto their oldest memories longer than their newer memories, and that reminiscing therapy sometimes settles behaviors down, it makes individuals less scared because they're more familiar with that information.
So while we're doing the reminiscing therapy with the individuals with dementia, we're going to be working with the caregivers and say, "Here's some tips and tricks for you to do at home to make things more calm or more organized," so that the individual, the caregiver, as well as the individual with dementia have more supports around them so that they age better. We can't stop the decline in dementia, but we can certainly hold off some of the changes with therapy.
Those kinds of groups, from the children's groups through the adult and geriatric groups, really allow our students to again go beyond the treatment room and become more familiar with all the aspects, not just sort of the assessment and treatment aspects of communication disorders.
