Speech Pathologists at Northern Health work as important members of the health team in acute care, rehabilitation, aged care, community and paediatric services.
Speech Pathologists work with people who have difficulty communicating or experience difficulties swallowing food and drink safely. These difficulties can be due to different causes, including developmental delays, learning disability, intellectual disability, stroke, brain injuries, progressive neurological diseases and dementia.
What to expect from the service?
Speech Pathology provide a variety of inpatient and outpatient services across Northern Health sites.
These include (but are not limited to):
Working with children:
- Helping babies and preschool children with feeding difficulties (e.g. problems with sucking and swallowing, or eating/drinking stills that affect health, growth or development)
- Assessing and providing therapy to children with delays in language, speech, play, and cognition.
- Educating and supporting family/caregivers to facilitate their child’s development and learning of children.
- Speech Pathologists working with children are based at Northern Hospital Epping and Craigieburn Community Hospital.
Working in Acute Care, Rehabilitation and Community:
- Assessing and providing therapy for disorders of swallowing, communication and/or cognition.
- Assisting in the provision of a diagnosis for those with cognitive impairment indicative of dementia, therapy and family assistance for those diagnosed with dementia.
- Performing instrumental swallow assessments to guide swallowing management, including Videofluoroscopic Swallowing Studies (VFSS) and flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing (FEES).
- These services are based at Northern Hospital Epping, Bundoora Centre, Broadmeadows Hospital and Craigieburn Community Hospital.