This article is a written transcript of the course, “Putting the Pieces Together: Research to Practice in Dysphagia”, presented by Cynthia O’Donoghue, Ph.D. on September 23, 2011.
>> Amy: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this week's Virtual Conference on Dysphagia Management. We're very pleased to have all of you joining us today, the last day of what has been an outstanding conference. I'm sure all of you would agree who have been able to attend several of our events this week. Today's expert seminar is entitled “Putting the Pieces Together: Research to Practice in Dysphagia Management” presented by Dr. Cynthia O'Donoghue, and we are very pleased to have her with us this afternoon. My name is Amy Hansen and I will be the moderator for today's course. If you are interested in becoming a peer reviewer for today's course or any other course in our library, please feel free to contact Amy Natho at anatho@speechpathology.com for further details. Basically, we ask that you have at least three years of professional experience in the clinical area that is under review. For those of you who are new to our online learning platform, you do have the ability to interact with the presenter throughout today's presentation. Well, at this time it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Cynthia O'Donoghue this afternoon. Dr. O'Donoghue is a Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at James Madison University, Harrisburg, Virginia. She teaches graduations courses and conducts research in cognitive‑linguistics and secondary to acquired brain injury and dysphagia management with focus on the efficacy of intervention and mechanism to improve swallow function. She is known nationally and internationally in her area of expertise. Welcome, Cynthia and thank you so much for joining us today. (applause)
>> Cynthia: Thank you, Amy. I appreciate that kind introduction. I feel a little bit like I'm on an airline and listening to my instructions for what I need to do during my seminar, and we all appreciate your guidance during this hour that we will be together. I would first like to start by getting a little bit of a feel for my audience and your background. It is important for me to be able to gear some of my examples specifically to you, so I'm going to ask a couple of questions and if you can assist me by answering using your “raising your hand” button over on the left‑hand side of your screen. I'm first going to ask about work settings, and I'm going to go through a list of work settings and try not to forget anybody, but when I name your work setting if it is your environment, please use your hand raising button. So the first setting I'm going to check is acute or rehab. If you work in acute or rehab, please let me know. Looks like a fair amount of people are in the acute or rehab environment, that’s wonderful. Thank you my acute care providers and my rehabbers. Now, let's go on and let's try another work setting, and if you are attending today and your primary place where you're rendering dysphagia management services is in a skilled nursing facility, could you please raise your hand for me? Okay. Now I would like to see - do I have anyone (I'm sure hoping that I do) from the school environment or the school setting who is now working with children who have swallowing or swallowing impairments? Could you raise your hand? All right, now let's do one more setting. Let's do outpatient or any other setting that you may be in. Okay. Thank you very much, that was quite helpful.
Course Objectives
Now what we're going to do is move right along into the presentation itself and as you know, we have learning objectives for what we hope to accomplish in this short hour that we have together today. Hopefully we are going to be able to use some of the information that has been shared during the week, but don't worry if you haven't been to all the presentations this week because I didn't get to all of them myself.
- We will take some of the important information and recent knowledge on the dynamic processes of swallowing and focus on what can happen if we have issues with mismanagement.
- We will also be looking at evidence based practice, and we will be talking about it in some detail, enough to at least get us comfortable with the concept. We have heard this over and over again, about what are the components of evidence based practice and how can we think about these components and start to give a more equal distribution to what we sometimes call the evidence based triangle, and really make it an equilateral triangle for evidence based practice.
- Finally, this is where the rubber hits the road, and we will use two different case scenarios where we can think about how can we apply some of the things that we have learned into our real world work environment because we know that sometimes bridging that research to practice is where the real challenge is. So, I'm hoping that my many years of clinical practice prior to being a full‑time academic will help me be able to walk across that bridge with you today.
- One thing that I did not mention that is on my mind now, if you have questions, go ahead and type them in the question box on the left‑hand side of your screen as Amy had indicated, and then hopefully we will have time at the end of the presentation to address any of the questions that you have brought forward, and I hear from Amy that there were some excellent questions that were presented earlier in the week, so I look forward to that interaction. So let's get rolling. . .
