Management of phonological speech sound disorders: A survey of current UK speech and language therapy practice

Last week, Natalie Hegarty  presented a poster titled: "The Management of Phonological Speech Sound Disorders: A Survey of Current UK Speech and Language Therapy Practice" at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists Northern Ireland Hub Conference in Templepatrick, Northern Ireland. The poster included data based on a survey of 165 speech and language therapists conducted as part of her PhD. Natalie is supervised by Jill Titterington and Laurence Taggart from Ulster University, and myself. Here are some of her conclusions:

• SLTs commonly employ speech discrimination, phonological awareness and the minimal pairs approach to remediate phonological SSD. They rarely use complexity approaches.
• SLTs typically employ once weekly, 1:1 sessions lasting 21-30mins for 9-12 weeks. Most SLTs (70.8%) feel that this dose is sufficient to remediate moderate-severe consistent phonological SSD.