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My Notepad

Welcome to Week 3 in the Speech Therapy Makeover series! I’m challenging myself to “make over” some traditional speech therapy tasks so they will be more person-centered (functional, meaningful, and relevant for the people we work with). We know that person-centered care offers the best results across the board for outcomes, patient satisfaction, and efficiency of meeting goals.

Week 3 Speech Therapy Makeover Task: Clinician-centered goals: “The patient will be educated about speech therapy goals at first treatment session due to time constraints today.”

Let Me Explain: I can’t be the only one who has ever written at the end of the report that I will review the therapy goals with the patient at the first treatment session. To simplify, this means that I set the goals without the Person and I’m letting him/her know what we are doing in speech therapy when I see them next. Traditionally, SLP evaluations were completed in this order:

The Challenge: The sequence described above is clinician-centered, not person-centered. Person-centered care has a different structure for what an evaluation should look like. Consider the following sequence instead:

Person-Centered Ideas: The third step of a person-centered evaluation felt both scandalous and freeing to me when I started working this way. So, if someone couldn’t recall +5/5 unrelated words, but they were not concerned with their memory and expressed that they did not want to address memory…..this meant I didn’t work on memory? Yes, that’s exactly what it meant. I prioritize what the Person wants to address. By doing this, I easily establish a working relationship so that I can bring up future conversations about memory if needed, and at the minimum educate the Person that I am available to address that if their priorities change. We are teammates in therapy so together we decide how we will proceed in meeting goals.

Setting Goals: Step 1 of a Person-Centered Evaluation is rich in person-centered goal needs / ideas. Instead of writing generic goals (“The patient will comprehend 3-step commands with 90% acc.”), I am really focusing in on more specific goals as they direct my therapy to be person-centered and focus on what that Person needs to do (“The patient will comprehend 8+ digits over the telephone to simulate work environment, with 95% acc and independence with using comprehension repair strategies.”) See Writing Functional Goals if you need more ideas.

Thanks for reading! If you would like more person-centered therapy ideas, please check out my Shop. Be sure to follow on Facebook , Pinterest, Instagram or sign up for email updates to receive the series right in your inbox. If you have any ideas of speech therapy tasks you think need a “makeover”, email me at [email protected].

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