This article is a transcript of the seminar, “Challenges and Solutions to Providing Treatment for Acquired Communication Disorders in Long Term Care,” presented by Jean Nisenboum.
>> Jean Nisenboum: Thank you Amy. Hi and welcome to all of you. I am sure that some of you are on lunch break now or are having lunch, so I want to thank you for sharing your lunch time with me. I would like to find out a little bit about all of you. Can you show me how many of you are currently working in long-term care facilities? Okay it looks like there are several of you who are working and then even more. For those of you who are not, hopefully you are considering working in long-term care facilities. As Amy said, I am employed at Case Western Reserve University, but I do currently work and supervise students in long-term care facilities and the challenges that I am going to be presenting today are challenges that really my colleagues and I face daily in this long-term care setting. For those of you who work in this setting, I am sure there are challenges that you face as well. I am also going to suggest some possible solutions to some of these challenges and I hope that helps those of you working in this settings. For those of you who do not, I hope that this lecture encourages you to work in long-term care settings.
Definitions
Just so we are all on the same page, I do want to go over a couple of definitions because the terms long-term care facility and long-term care setting are used to mean a variety of different things. For this lecture, long-term care facilities include nursing homes, which are also called ECF or extended care facilities, and skilled nursing facilities which are called SNF. These facilities provide healthcare to people who are unable to manage independently in the community. Now in many places, the SNF is housed within the nursing home and those patients tend to be there for either rehabilitation care post-stroke or head injury after a hospitalization, and maybe they cannot participate in high level rehab. They also include the nursing home patients. So placement in the long-term care facility may be permanent or temporary for short-term rehabilitation or for custodial care if the family is going away. In either case, the speech pathologist may be asked to see the patient.
