It has come to my attention that there may be some confusion about what our clinic is all about. We often have phone calls from families, schools and other therapy clinics seeking an evaluation to "get a device" for a nonverbal or low-verbal patient. When we get these calls we always take a deep breath and start to explain...
We are a therapy clinic with a specialization in AAC. We aren't an evaluation clinic where a patient comes for a single shot evaluation to "get a device." There's a good reason for this! In the field of AAC there is a tremendous problem with device rejection. The team, including the family, is usually very excited and raring to go in the initial stages of getting a communication device. Everyone is excited by the potential and ready to hear what our kids have to say. Within a few months though, the reality of learning a whole new language often sets in. AAC devices, or iPads with apps, don't solve speech problems, they just give us an easier way to communicate...but easier doesn't mean easy. The novelty wears off, the consistent implementation becomes tedious and the device spends more time sitting alone on the table. THAT is where we come in! Having a knowledgeable AAC specialist to keep the team moving forward, looking to the future and troubleshooting difficulties is the KEY to defeating device rejection and continuing on the journey to improved communication and language.
We vehemently do NOT believe that single visit evaluations for AAC are best practice.
The skills required to evaluate and fund an appropriate AAC system are also the skills needed to implement it. Evaluation and funding are formidable tasks requiring training, experience and equipment. Despite this fact, getting the device is actually the "easy" part. The hard part about AAC is making it work! Successful implementation requires "more" training and experience than funding a device. For this reason, we aren't content to simply hand a device to a patient and watch them walk away. Too many times they've walked back, years later, explaining that the device "just didn't work." It's defeating to get excited about a patient's potential only to see it never come to fruition because their family didn't have the support they needed.
And what about that "speech" therapy degree? We therapists aren't just AAC specialists. We are speech language pathologists and we want your child to talk too! AND we want to make sure they have developed enough language skills to have something to say! You can be sure that if a patient is coming to us for an AAC device, they most likely have speech and language difficulties that need to be addressed as well. Many of our patients also have feeding and oral motor problems too. For these reasons, every year our therapists participate in local, state and national training to improve their skills in AAC, language, feeding, oral motor and speech evaluation and therapy. We take the time to learn how to implement these treatments as well as AAC so that we can take care of the whole person who comes to us.
So, come see us! But you should expect when you roll through our doors, we're not going to let you go easily!
If you are a therapist and you want some guidance to help your patient, come on in! We will be happy to help you take a look at devices, share some of our resources to learn to fund and implement devices for your patients. We have on-going relationships with other speech therapists and practices who have exhibited a commitment to learning to provide good AAC services to their patients. We even swap training for areas of therapy we need help to learn!
BUT, please don't ask us to do an evaluation that you aren't willing to learn to do yourself and expect that we will trust you to take the time to learn to implement the device. We will never solicit a patient from another therapist but we will, every time, ensure that we are advising our patients about the need for on-going AAC therapy, modifications and training when we send them home with a device. We do this because we a committed to making our patients as successful as possible!
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