Supporting communication for children with cerebral palsy in hospital: views of community and hospital staff.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to investigate the views of allied health and nursing staff on supporting the communication of children with cerebral palsy (CP) and complex communication needs (CCN) in hospital. METHOD: We conducted 12 focus groups with 49 community- and hospital-based allied health professionals and hospital nurses. RESULTS: Participants reported having active roles in supporting children's seating, mobility, equipment, mealtime management and psychosocial needs, but not in supporting the children's communication in hospital. Participants described several environmental barriers to supporting children's augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) in hospital, and suggested a range of strategies to ease communication difficulties at the bedside. CONCLUSION: Results indicate a potential new role for community- and hospital-based health professionals in supporting nurses to implement AAC strategies at the bedside. Supporting nursing staff to remove environmental barriers and use communication technologies might create a more communicatively accessible hospital ward for children with CP and CCN.

Parents and children with cerebral palsy discuss communication needs in hospital.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to understand the communication needs and experiences of parents and children with cerebral palsy (CP) and complex communication needs (CCN) in hospital. METHODS: Focus groups with 10 parents and interviews with seven children with CP and CCN were analysed for content themes. RESULTS: Results demonstrated that children often want to communicate directly with hospital staff to: gain attention, answer yes/no, convey basic physical needs, give and receive information, control their environment and participate in preferred activities. Barriers to communication included lack of access to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), staff preferring to communicate with parents and lack of time to communicate. CONCLUSIONS: Results highlight strategies for successful communication, the role of the parents in supporting communication and provision of AAC systems for children in hospital. Policy and practice implications in the preparation of children with CP and CCN for communication in hospital are discussed.

Is listener comfort a viable construct in stuttering research?

This article reports the development of a tool for measuring how comfortable a person feels when communicating with someone who has undergone treatment for stuttering. The person rates the speaker on a 9-point Listener Comfort Scale (9 = extremely comfortable, 1 = extremely uncomfortable). In a preliminary investigation of the reliability and validity of the scale, 15 unsophisticated listeners rated video recordings of 10 adults before and after a prolonged-speech treatment for stuttering and of 10 matched controls. The results were compared with those of another 15 listeners who rated the same recordings with the widely used 9-point Speech Naturalness Scale (R. R. Martin, S. K. Haroldson, & K. A. Triden, 1984). Results showed that reliability of the Speech Naturalness Scale was superior to the Listener Comfort Scale, although users of both scales were able to distinguish between pretreatment speech, posttreatment speech, and the speech of controls. The results suggest that the Listener Comfort Scale captures information that is somewhat different than the information captured by the Speech Naturalness Scale. The authors concluded that the concept of listener comfort is a potentially useful additional way of investigating the social validity of behavioral treatments for stuttering.