Making a Difference for Speech and Language Therapy Conference & Study Day

09:00-16:00 Wednesday 7/12/2016

Medway Campus, Chatham, UK

Making a Difference for Speech and Language Therapy is a conference/study day to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Medway PGDip Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) course.

The title of this conference/study day was chosen by the current students on the course to reflect what speech and language therapy means to them. Therefore, we are focussing on how Medway SLT students and graduates have made a difference in the past and present and how they are going to make a difference in the future. We also want contributors from all over the country and the world to demonstrate to our current staff and students how they are making a difference.

Therefore, the day is split into themes of the past, present and future.

The early session will consist of a display of former Medway students and what they have done since graduating and there will be information about the history of the course so far. There will be a keynote speech from Chris Markham from University of Portsmouth (a key contributor to the course over the years) about “Quality of Life”, a key concept in “making a difference”.

The later morning will focus on the present with presentations from current members of staff on the Medway course. These will be on various topics including: spirituality in SLT, working with diverse populations, slow motion video for phonetic transcription, and intervention for speech disorders.

The afternoon session will focus on the future. There will be three streams: Paediatric SLT, Adult SLT, and Technology in SLT. There will first be a series of five-minute lightening talks for each stream and then round table discussions for each stream before the themes from the discussion are fed back to every at the end of the day prior to summing up.

As the overall topic of this conference/study is “making a difference”, we invite speakers from all over the UK and wider world to talk about how they “make a difference”. This can be a research presentation, a product or new way of working that you’ve developed, a positive service change that you’ve made, or just tell us about how you “make a difference” on a daily basis.

The Technology Stream

The technology stream is about any recent technological advances which can be used for SLT. We’d like to keep this pretty open. However, we invite talks from app developers, telehealth practitioners, AAC developers and computer based therapy developers. This is an opportunity to tell us how your practice or product can make a difference for SLT. We will then discuss the advantages/disadvantages of using different kinds of technology in SLT barriers and facilitators for using new technologies in SLT.

Alistair Edwards
Posted 15th November 2016 at 5:47 PM