The EST-project

Croatia Stuttering Symposium, day three

This week on the blog, we are continuing our summary of our trip to the Croatia stuttering symposium on the 19^th to the 22^nd of May. You can read a summary of day one here, and our guest bloggers entry about day two here. 

Sharon Millard, the research lead and clinical lead speech and language therapist at the Michal Palin Centre for stammering in London started the third day of the symposium. In her talk she gave a presentation of what she thought to be the five most important research findings to consider when treating pre-school children who stutter. These included findings that children can be impacted of stuttering from an early age, and that treatment effect vary. Children and parents respond differently to different treatments independent of which treatments. She also highlighted that varying degree of stuttering severity is normal in a trajectory of treatment and that treatment therefore needs to be flexible and closely monitoring the effect of the treatment over time. This lecture highlighted the growth in evidence in our field. Just during the last years more stuttering treatments studies have been conducted, with Millard being the one of the scholars adding to the evidence (Millard, Zebrowski & Kelman, 2018).

Like the other days, the second post of the day was master class demonstration dealing with speech pathology issues that occur in stuttering therapy. Elaine Kelman is a speech and language therapist and the head of the Michael Palin Centre for stammering. She presented video of cases and problems that can occur in treatment of preschool aged children who stutter. She emphasized the role of parents and how a client centered perspective can be used to help parents identify what they are already doing to help their children. She also showed examples of how to problem solve with parents and build confidence in ability to deliver treatment and support their child. For an introduction to the Palin PCI, see our blog post from the workshop that EST -team member Hilde attend earlier this year here.

The last master class of the day, clinical psychologist at the Australian Stuttering Research Centre Ross Menzies highlighted how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used both with young children and their parents. Parents of children who stutter can be very anxious for their child and their child’s future. The child can pick up on this anxiety and will learn through the parents that stutter is something to be afraid off. Menzies argued that SLPs can help parents change their concerns and anxiety by using strategies from CBT. An easy introduction to CBT for speech and language pathologists is given in the paper Cognitive behavior therapy for adults who stutter: A tutorial for speech-language pathologists (Menzies, Onslow, Packman & O’Brian, 2009). Because anxious parents often complicate treatment by increasing fear and overprotecting the child, Menzies also highlighted that building confidence and knowledge in parents is very important.

After the formal presentations, all symposium delegates were divided into discussion groups led by a master clinician or researcher. Many challenging questions came up during this time. During a plenary discussion the presenters were able to answer question and engaging in discussions with all the clinicians in the room. Discussions centered around what to do when parents don’t want to do the treatment and how it is possible to use cognitive therapy with young children.

Attending a symposium, and one that is small and focusing on discussions especially, provides excellent opportunities for engaging in great conversation with some of the leading clinician and researchers in our field. We are very thankful for all the great people that took the time to talk to us about their research, that inspire us to make decisions moving forward in our own research project.

 

We really enjoyed our chat on the balcony with Elaine Kelman and Sharon Millard.

 

We would like to express our gratitude to our research group Compros and the EST-project for funding our trip and attendance to the conference. From the EST- team, Linn and Åse

 

References

Menzies, R. G., Onslow, M., Packman, A., & O’Brian, S. (2009). Cognitive behavior therapy for adults who stutter: A tutorial for speech-language pathologists. Journal of fluency disorders, 34(3), 187-200.

Millard, S. K., Zebrowski, P., & Kelman, E. (2018). Palin Parent–Child Interaction Therapy: The Bigger Picture. American journal of speech-language pathology, 27(3S), 1211-1223.