Writing retreat at Klitgården Refugium, Denmark

On Friday 24^th August, the EST-team excitedly welcomed Elaina to Norway! We hit the ground running, meeting at the University of Oslo for our first face-to-face meeting and to make final preparations for our weeklong writing retreat in Denmark starting the following day. So, what do 5 SLPs in a car or sailing on a ferry to Denmark talk about?! Stuttering and language of course… even before departure!

Klitgården in Skagen, Denmark, was the summer house of the Danish King and his family until 1997. Since 2000 however it has become a retreat dedicated to artists and scientists to come together for stimulating discussions, to write grants and publications, exercise creativity and relax in the beautiful surroundings of the northern coast line of Denmark.

Kari-Anne, Linn and Hilde have previously had the pleasure of spending time at Klitgården. For Åse, Elaina and Melanie this was their first visit to Klitgården but it immediately felt like a second home. Even though Hilde is currently based in London she joined the team for the whole week. Karoline and Ane, who work at Statped, one of our collaboration partners, visited from Wednesday to Friday.

From left: Linn, Kari-Anne, Ane, Åse, Elaina, Melanie, Karoline and Hilde

We wanted to focus on two main aspects of our project during this writing retreat: the Cochrane and Prospero reviews and planning for the RCT. The first half of our stay was spent developing the screening protocols for the Prospero and Cochrane reviews. We are very pleased to say that we made great progress with the protocols for both reviews and even managed to start piloting them in Distiller SR! Screening articles really emphasized the importance of specifying that we are only interested in articles about stuttering as a speech disorder! We came across some entirely different fields of ‘stuttering’ research such as titles about the treatment of stuttering priapism… if you read about this you will quickly learn why it was not relevant to our project!

Discussions concerning the RCT were like the Danish weather – mostly calm and concentrated, accompanied by a bright smile for every task completed, but at times they were also stormy and heavy, loaded with methodological and ethical discussions! Our team has a diverse range of backgrounds and areas of expertise within speech-language pathology, research and culture. This ensured that we approached tasks from different points of view, asking each other lots of challenging questions and always arriving at more holistic decisions. Karoline and Ane provided important insights about clinical work with Norwegian children who stutter, constantly reminding us to set realistic goals to achieve in our project. 

The EST-project was awarded 15 million Norwegian kroner by the Norwegian Research Council. While that is undoubtedly a large amount of money, once we revised the the number of treatment hours to each child multiplied by the number of children we need to recruit to conduct a robust study within the total time frame for the project, we had to start thinking about alternative directions our work could take. Despite meticulous planning, long working days and a great effort by everyone in our team, we still have plenty to discuss and make decisions about and are looking forward to consulting with our expert panel over the coming months.

While our workdays were inspiring and exhausting, we also had a fabulous time getting to know each other on a personal level.  Here are some fun facts about our team: the average age of our team members is 37; nobody in the group owns a cat; 75 percent of us have kids – mostly boys; we enjoy running, hiking and swimming; we all like to read books (in addition to all of the reading that we do for our research!); cheesecake and lemon tart were equally voted as the cake of choice in our team! Thinking about research specifically, it seems we have a very complementary skill set and range of interested as illustrated in the screen shot from our get-to–know-each-other mentimeter vote!

We had an incredibly busy but wonderful time at Klitgården and are really looking forward to returning there later in the project to discuss and interpret all of the results from our RCT!

From the EST-team