BHSM Bulletin Board

OK, so I'm not giving Picasso a run for his money, but here's my BHSM board. I have facts about ASHA, SLPs, and communication and swallowing disorders. In the middle is my BHSM "Fact of the Day".

Some of my patients helped with the design lay-out as a cognitive task.

By the way, I missed my post yesterday due to technical difficulties. Another post to come this evening.

Cognitive- Linguistic Tx: How do you address it in your setting?

I enjoy working with patient's on cognitive retraining, and recently have received a new book by Claudia Allen, as well as the Allen Cognitive Level Screen. Although the materials are geared toward Occupational Therapists (makes sense; Claudia Allen is an OT!), I find her model extremely helpful.

How do address cognitive impairments in your facility/ work setting? Do you collaborate with Occupational Therapists?

I am constantly striving to educate colleagues and staff about our scope of practice as SLPs in skilled nursing facilities. Yes, we do more than "feed people".

BHSM Update

I finally made a plan for BHSM, and put together a bulletin board in the facility with a description about what SLPs do, as well as information on communication, cognitive and swallowing disorders. I was keeping it "bare bones" at first, but then I looked around at the boards that the activities department puts together. They are pretty fancy and flowery! So, I used a bright yellow background with green trim, and added some flowers and flourishes here and there. Still, not too frou-frou.

One of my cognitive patients helped me with it as part of a problem solving task. This was only 15 minutes of our tx time that day, and I really had the board all planned out, but measuring and laying out the background and the borders was a good problem solving task, and now she tells everyone that she helped design it. She's quite proud! It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself.

I added a "BHSM Fact of the Day" space, which I made by taking a plastic page protector and taping a border around it to make a frame. I slip a different fact about speech, hearing, swallowing, communication etc. into it each morning.

I think that on the last week of BHSM, I will make up a short quiz based on the Fact of the Day information that I used, and give a small prize to whomever gets the most correct.

Any other SLPs in the SNFs (or anywhere) doing anything this month?

Widely Accepted Terms Related to Disability

I found this wonderful resource while reading about "Misconceptions About People with Hearing Loss", which inspired a recent blog post. I think I will print it and bring it to work.

DEAL: Glossary of Preferred Terms

As human beings, we will all make mistakes. Recently, I wrote about how I  used the term "hearing impaired". Now, however, I know the preferred term is "deaf" or "hard of hearing." Although, if a person described herself as "hearing impaired", then I would use that term, as clearly it is a term they accept and use themselves. 

I know this list relates primarily to performers and the arts, so it is not necessarily meant to be a comprehensive list for health care professionals, but I was surprised to see no entry related to people who stutter.

Spring Cleaning: How Long to Keep Textbooks?

Husband and I are participating in our seasonal ritual of cleaning out the old. We have consciously downsized  over the past two years, moving from a four bedroom house to much more humble digs in order to have time and resources for experiences versus things. 


As we move from room to room (bedroom and office are on the list for today), I come across old textbooks from graduate school. Most of my adult-centered materials are in my office at work, so these are primarily language development and disorders, articulation/ phonological disorders, audiology and fluency texts. I haven't needed to refer to them in about 3-4 years, but I feel like they are still great references. I do have limited storage space at home. I could pack them away in storage, but then I know I would never use them because, well, "out of sight, out of mind."

So, how long do you keep your old textbooks? Indefinitely? Some of these textbooks were actually given to me by other clinicians who either left the field or only worked with a certain population.