This week we have welcomed Lucy Rodgers to the Children's Voices Centre. Lucy's visit is supported by her Wellcome funded clinical PhD fellowship. She is studying her PhD at City St Georges, University of London, UK. Here is her bio
Lucy is a Speech and Language Therapist who has been working in the UK National Health Service for 18 years. In 2021, she was awarded a National Institute of Health Research pre-doctoral clinical academic fellowship. In 2022, she commenced her Wellcome funded ‘health advances in under-represented populations and diseases’ (HARP) clinical PhD fellowship at City St Georges, University of London. In her PhD work, Lucy is developing a novel intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of a SSD and DLD. As well as her subject-specific interests in SSD and DLD, Lucy is passionate about co-design, patient and public involvement (PPI), and supporting healthcare access in under-served groups.Her seminar for the CVC team is titled: Developing a novel, complex intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of speech sound disorder (SSD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Here is the abstract
Approximately 40% of 4 year olds with a speech sound disorder (SSD) also have features of a developmental language disorder (DLD) (Eadie et al., 2015). This co-occurring profile is associated with later negative outcomes relating to communication, literacy and quality of life (Lewis et al., 2015; Wren et al., 2016; Hayiou-Thomas et al., 2017). Yet, there are few interventions to date which have been developed to meet the specific needs of this clinical group. The aim is to develop a novel, complex intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of SSD and DLD.
Methods: Methods were informed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) guidance for developing and evaluating complex interventions (Skivington et al., 2021).
• Phase 1- systematic review to explore similarities and differences between intervention techniques for SSD/DLD and relate to underlying theory.
• Phase 2- online survey of current clinical practice (108 UK SLTs).
• Phase 3- two round e-Delphi with 35 UK based expert SLTs to gain consensus on core intervention elements, based on the findings from phases 1 and 2.
• Phase 4a- refinements to the intervention in response to feedback from 6 parents from low SES and/or non English speaking backgrounds.
• Phase 4b (current)- six NHS SLTs reviewing the intervention protocol to optimise operationalisation within clinical services.
A mixed steering group of people with lived experience (an adult with DLD, a parent of a child with SSD/DLD) and professionals (3 speech and language therapists, a bilingual education support worker, a specialist teacher) have overseen all project phases.
Results and conclusions: Following the 4 study phases, we now have a draft intervention protocol which has been mapped on to the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) framework (Hoffmann et al., 2014). We also have a corresponding ‘Theory of Change’, which outlines how different intervention components (relating to linguistic and behaviour change theory, and implementation science) are anticipated to interact with each other. The face validity of the intervention has been strengthened by the involvement of a diverse range of relevant professionals and people with lived experience within the intervention development process. However, further refinements may be made to the intervention in response to initial trialling.
Conclusions & Implications: The results suggest that ECE teachers are moderately accurate in judging children’s language skills, while also showing tendencies for judgment inaccuracies. Furthermore, their assessments alone may not suffice for identifying language delays. Combining multiple sources of information is essential. Future research should report detailed teacher and child characteristics to enhance meta-analytic synthesis.
