A variety of specialty speech, voice and audiology clinics will be offered this fall by the University Hearing and Speech Clinic, a joint program of Washington State and Eastern Washington universities.
The clinic serves patients ranging from professional voice users, such as singers and teachers, to those with Parkinson’s disease and advanced hearing loss, and works with infants to elderly adults. Costs to patients are on a sliding scale based on income, and the clinic can bill Medicaid and insurance companies. The Health Sciences Building at Riverpoint houses the new facility and supports it with the latest equipment. Students working toward their professional graduate degrees conduct the clinic under faculty supervision.
One of the available therapies is the Lingraphica System. This is a user-friendly, computer-based tool that enables patients to communicate without words, using a picture language that Lingraphica translates into audible English. The system particularly helps those with acquired communication deficits, like aphasia and apraxia, and benefits a wide range of patients, including those who have suffered from stroke or head injury years ago. The clinic is the only provider of Lingraphica therapy in Spokane.
The Voice Clinic offers diagnostic and therapeutic services for a wide variety of problems related to loss of voice, voice quality, pitch and loudness, which may be due to organic or functional causes. Clinicians also advise proper voice use and vocal hygiene. High-risk clients include people whose jobs require excessive daily use of voice, and those who are exposed to airborne fibers, gases, excessive noise and other environmental factors in the workplace.
The Auditory Processing Disorders Clinic is a collaborative venture involving graduate students and faculty in both audiology and speech-language pathology. The clinic evaluates, diagnoses and treats children and adults who have normal hearing yet experience difficulty in understanding what they hear. Services are available to children and adults who have difficulty attending to what they hear, understanding auditory information, comprehending the meaning of auditory messages, hearing speech in noise, or working with reading, writing, spelling or math.
The Lee Silverman Voice Treatment clinic serves people with Parkinson’s disease, helping them strengthen muscles around the vocal cords and speak with more volume and clarity than those receiving standard speech therapy. Doreen Evans, one of only a handful of area clinicians certified to provide LSVT therapy, is the director. At least 75 percent of those with Parkinson’s have a speech disorder, and nearly 50 percent have a swallowing problem. LSVT both improves speech and minimizes mild swallowing difficulties.
The Accent Modification Clinic aids foreign-born individuals in improving their spoken English. A set of practice exercises available on CD-ROM or cassette supplements the individualized learning program, which is based on a phonetic analysis of the client’s tape-recorded speech. Group instruction and practice, personalized training manuals and practice tapes, and a self-study program are included, with a tape-recorded reevaluation at the end of the clinic to measure success.
