Useful Information

A guide to support your bedside AAC service development, from groundwork to growth

Communication access plays a vital role in supporting safe, equitable, and high-quality care for patients with communication vulnerabilities in acute care hospitals. Yet, despite strong evidence and growing awareness, SLPs often encounter significant challenges when initiating or expanding hospital-based AAC services.

This guide was created by speech-language pathologists who routinely provide bedside AAC care in inpatient hospital settings, lead department and hospital-wide efforts to integrate communication access and patient-provider communication into hospital care, and mentor acute care SLPs across the United States. The Inpatient AACcelerator is designed to help clinicians examine current barriers, needs, and solutions to enhance bedside AAC services across operational, clinical, and system considerations.

Throughout the guide, you will find posed questions to consider individually or with colleagues, along with example solutions that can support planning and next steps. When using this guide, we encourage you to think about your priorities, needs, long-term goals, and short-term goals to guide your bedside AAC service delivery. While the guide does not expand upon bedside AAC clinical assessments and intervention practices, we encourage you to get started whenever and however you can.

In the field of Intensive Care and Neuro-Rehabilitation patients often have temporary, and sometimes long term, inability to speak anymore. If relatives live far away or cannot visit the patients regularly due to different reasons (e.g. care of children, financial reasons) phone calls and videocalls may be the only possibility to stay in contact. Additionally, in times of COVID-19 visits are very restricted or forbidden in most hospitals or nursing homes.

A direct contact via phone or videocalls between the patient and the relatives is highly important. For the relatives it is important to feel safe about the well-being of the patient, to get literally "a picture" of the situation, to have a chance to get involved in vital decisions and to continue social roles, for example as parents, children, partners or siblings. For the patients it can be important for their emotional well-being and comfort to hear familiar voices (even if he or she is in a minimally conscious state), to stay in touch with the family and friends, to feel supported and to take part in the life at home from afar. Calls can also be a great motivation and a "natural reason" to use voice and to be talkative again. Not infrequently the first verbal utterances after traumatic injury or in people with severe aphasia are evoked by the familiar routine of phone calls.

But how can providers assist in (video-)calls, especially if the patient cannot speak, if the patient is not yet able to communicate independently, or not even able to socially connect to others?
This paper aims to give some guidelines and support for different challenges in assisting a call, including means and methods of alternative and augmentative communication.

Throughout the current COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are experiencing a surge of patients who may temporarily be unable to speak while also caring for patients with existing communication difficulties. This session will present current patient-provider communication barriers experienced in hospitals as well as AAC solutions to address these barriers. Emergency preparedness and communication planning tips related to the pandemic will also be provided.

Document Cover

A long and winding road Improving communication with patients in the NHS

Report warns that poor communication in the NHS has a profound impact on patient care, staff burnout and public funds in the UK.

Boston, November, 2018

Health Literacy and Communication, a new topic area in 2018, addressed the diverse ways in which the fields of audiology and speech-language pathology optimize health outcomes for individuals/communities and facilitate patient-provider communication across the continuum of care.