We are a group of Speech and Language Therapy students at UCL campaigning to raise awareness of the importance of Speech and Language Therapists, as part of the national campaign Giving Voice
www.givingvoiceuk.org/key-campaign-messages/

20% of the population may experience difficulties in communication at some point in their lives.

• 7% of five year olds entering school have significant difficulties with speech and/or language
• 60% of young offenders have speech, language and communication needs
• 50,000 people who have a stroke every year have speech and language difficulties.
• 700,000 people with dementia have speech, language and communication needs
• An estimated 80% of people with Alzheimers disease have eating difficulties which make them at risk of malnutrition
• Up to 75% of stroke survivors will have problems with swallowing immediately after their stroke

During the week of 23rd June 2014, we will be completing various challenges to raise awareness of the difficulties that our clients face on a daily basis. These challenges include spending the week communicating using non-verbal means such as Makaton and PECS (a system of pictures and symbols), wearing a hearing aid, voluntary stammering, eating pureed food and drinking thickened fluids. We will all be blogging about our experiences here: http://uclugivingvoiceblog.wordpress.com/

All the money raised will go to the Stroke Association, a charity which provides support to stroke survivors, families and carers, as well as funding research into the prevention and treatment of stroke.

Sarah Cox: For the Challenge I will be voluntarily stammering for the week. Voluntary Stammering is a technique sometimes used by adults who stammer to help them to be more in control of their stammer, and to reduce anxiety around stammering. As a person without a stammer, I normally have fluent speech, but I will be deliberately altering the fluency of my speech to experience some of the feelings that people with a stammer may face on a daily basis, and also to raise awareness that stammering is not just a childhood condition, and affects around 1 in 100 adults.

Helen Currie: For the Challenge I will be using alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) to request my wants and needs. I will use a speech aid app on my handheld device to communicate without speech. I will be doing this to experience some of the feelings and everyday difficulties that people who use AAC may face both in socializing and in every day activities, and also to raise awareness that many people with a variety of difficulties rely on AAC to aid their communication. People who make use of AAC include individuals with a variety of congenital conditions such as cerebral palsy, autism, learning disability, and acquired conditions such as traumatic brain injury and aphasia.

Venetia Clark, Lucy Crook and Fiona Moore: We are taking on the challenge of only eating pureed food. Our usual diet of pizza, salad, biscuits and fruit will be replaced by pureed food, which requires no chewing and is thick in consistency. This is not a new diet fad! It is the reality faced by many who suffer from swallowing difficulties (“dysphagia”). It affects a wide group of society, from those who have strokes, dementia, mouth/oesophageal cancer and learning disabilities. We will be doing this challenge to gain a better understanding of what it is like to live on this diet and to raise awareness of some of the issues that people with swallowing difficulties may face in their daily lives.

Claire Foster and Alba Frederick: For most of us downing our morning cup of coffee, drinking a nice, cold glass of water on a hot day or relaxing on a Friday night with glass of wine doesn't take much thinking about. But for some people following a stroke or brain injury and in conditions like motor neurone disease and multiple sclerosis, their ability to swallow can be severely impaired. Speech and Language Therapists work with these people to try and regain some of their swallow function. One technique is to add a thickener to fluids which makes them thick and syrupy. When a liquid is more viscous, it travels down the throat much more slowly and gives people's swallowing muscles time to respond. From the Challenge we will be drinking ONLY thickened liquids to experience what it's like for some of our clients.

Dominic Pittman: My challenge is to communicate in the way that some who have lost the physical structures that produce speech must.  A Laryngectomy is a surgical procedure that cuts out the whole Larynx, the part of the throat containing the Vocal Chords, which are the source of noise in our speech (put your hand on your neck and make a “zzz” and then a “sss” sound).  Because of this, the Laryngectomee (someone who has had a Laryngectomy) now breathes through a hole in their neck, a Stoma.  There are several ways a Laryngectomee can communicate, from using the AAC Helen Currie mentions, to the perhaps most familiar artificial voice box, the buzzing device some hold up to their neck to replicate that buzzing in voice.   Increasingly these days, people opt to use Tracheo-Oesophageal Voice, which involves breathing in through the Stoma, then closing this off and breathing out through a special hole made between the windpipe and the Oesophagus (the food pipe, which is still connected to our Mouth).  I will be wearing an HME (Heat-Moisture Exchange), the device people use to close their Stoma when they talk, for the week (or as long as it lasts!).

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