Exploring the outcomes and perceptions of people with aphasia who conversed with speech pathology students via telepractice: a pilot study

ABSTRACT

Research has found that people with aphasia (PWA) may experience psychosocial benefits from participating in communication partner training (CPT). It is unknown whether similar benefits are found if components of the CPT are delivered via telepractice. This pilot study aimed to explore PWAs’ perceptions of: (a) their communication confidence and self-esteem after communicating with speech-language pathology (SLP) students via telepractice as part of a CPT programme; (b) whether it is important for SLP students to converse with PWA; and (c) the suitability of using telepractice to facilitate these conversations. Five adults with aphasia participated. A single group, pre-test post-test design was utilised. Standardised measures were used to capture changes in the participants’ self-reported communication confidence and self-esteem. A verbal questionnaire was used to obtain participants’ perceptions of the programme. Post-CPT, a significant decrease occurred on one confidence item. Non-significant improvement was noted on other items. All five participants believed it was important for SLP students to converse with PWA. Content analysis of the participants’ responses revealed two categories: (a) aphasia being a chronic communication difficulty and (b) conversing with PWA can be scary and different from conversing with adults without aphasia. Four out of five participants thought that telepractice was suitable for conversing with students. Results suggest that PWA may experience psychosocial benefits from conversing with students via telepractice. Confirmation of these findings from a larger scale study would have implications not only for PWA, but also for SLPs providing clinical services to PWA and for educators of SLP students.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• communication partner training
• telepractice
• confidence
• self-esteem
• speech-language pathology students

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the participants for their time. This research is part of a larger programme of research exploring CPT. The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the larger project team (Ms Adele Coleman, Ms Ashley Cameron, Professor Jennifer Fleming, Dr Jennifer Lethlean, Associate Professor Steven McPhail, Professor David Copland, and Professor Deborah Theodoros).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.