Already Finished?! Spring '13 and Summa Time Freedom

Six weeks flies by way too fast! I've just finished up my (very) short spring classes today and I have to say, I fell in love with my Dysphagia class. Six weeks was not long enough for that class and I would've happily taken it over the entire summer.

There were many things I really enjoyed learning about in this class, but I want to highlight the class project for dysphagia which was to collaborate with a classmate and develop an educational material for either SLPs, other medical staff, patients/clients, teachers, or anyone we could think of (one group designed a dysphagia book for children!). My partner and I decided to research pre-treatment swallowing exercises for patients undergoing chemo-radiation for head and neck cancer.

As we started to go through the literature we found some support for these exercises, but not much that would be considered Level I EBP. Only a few were randomized-control studies and many of those journal articles we found cited sample small sizes as the biggest limiting factor to definitively supporting pre-treatment swallowing exercises. A few others that we found only performed a retrospective review of case files which is at a level III EBP, and those studies tended to show that pre-treatment exercises were more useful than not. I am discovering that case file reviews are used quite often as well as small sample sizes and not enough randomized-control studies are often the norm in our profession. A quote from an SLP who sent me some information for this project sums up the problem quite nicely,  "I think this topic really gets at what Rosenbek refers to as 'the tyranny of the randomized control trial'.  In our profession (which lacks such evidence on most topics) it would be easy to do nothing because we don't have level 1 evidence for it."

I'm keeping an eye on a study currently underway at the University of Alabama that is looking to determine if pre-treatment swallowing exercises can improve

Research for Child Placement

I finally got this… can’t wait to have time to start reading it!  It’s a bit older (1999), but will get me started on getting prepared for what I hope to be my child placement for my externship.  It will definitely be a great jumping off point to finding other relevant journal articles. 

Pediatric placement

It’s still a long way away, but I already have an idea where I want to do my pediatric placement for my last semester of grad school in SLP.  I’m looking into working with children with cancer and mentioned it to my advisor yesterday as a possibility.  He has a placement in mind, which he said that this particular placement has a very rigorous interview process so I will have to start a year in advance.  If I am still leaning towards this kind of placement, I will start the application process Fall 2013 so I can be (hopefully) placed by Fall 2014.  Even if I don’t get it, it will definitely be a great learning experience just applying for it.  

Did a search online to see what would come up for pediatric cancer and SLP, and there isn’t a whole lot of information out there.  Here’s what I found so far:

Speech Pathology Services to Children With Cancer and Nonmalignant Hematological Disorders

Last Words, Last Connections

How Augmentative Communication Can Support Children Facing End of Life

Making Every Moment Count

Pediatric Cancer

Survivors are vulnerable to neurocognitive problems

And found this book, which I ordered today:

Communication Disorders in Childhood Cancer

It’s older but might be a good place to start!