Factors Contributing to Successful AAC Provision: Insights from a Case Series

Description

The Communication Aid Service East of England (CASEE) is a specialised service covering six counties, with an active caseload of over 350 clients. The service uses the AAC subscale of the Therapy Outcome Measures (AAC-TOM, Enderby,
2014) to monitor outcomes for patients and to provide information on the efficiency of the service. At last year’s conference, we presented service-level data on the outcomes for patients known to our team (Griffiths & Hale, 2018).

In this paper, we will present a case series of ten patients known to the CASEE Team: five patients who made the largest gains in the Activity and / or participation domains and five who made no change. The authors will present each case using the ICF as a descriptive framework (Pennington, Marshall & Goldbart, 2007), and discuss the commonalities and differences between them, providing a thematic analysis of both groups. Possible contributing factors such as
diagnosis, environment and levels of support will be discussed.

We will also review the goals set by the team during assessment for these clients and consider whether these were well aligned with the individual’s needs and preferences. We will analyse the skills targeted by the goals using Light’s model of communicative competence (Light, 1989; Light & McNaughton, 2014) and review whether a focus on any particular competency is related to gains observed in the
TOMs domains across the group. We will also discuss the similarities and differences in goal setting as part of the assessment process and the onward therapeutic journey, considering the function of goal setting in the assessment
process.

The presentation will summarise the themes which emerge from analysing the goals and AAC-TOM outcome data, seeking to identify factors that may have contributed to the functional success or failure of these episodes of matching person and technology.

Period	9 Sept 2019
Event title	Communication Matters: International Conference 2019
Event type	Conference
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International