Today is swallowing awareness day. This is a day designed to recognise the difficulties children and adults with swallowing difficulties have on a daily basis and to raise awareness.

Some common signs that eating, drinking or swallowing are difficult during meals are; coughing, gagging, watery eyes, change of colour, wet voice or breath sounds, frequent chest infections and effort to swallow.

Speech and Language Therapy can help children with these difficulties, get in touch if you have concerns.

Happy Sign Language Week from the Hackney Speech and Language Therapy Team! Here’s Martina, our specialist in Deafness explaining her role in Hackney. Martina also explains why we celebrate Sign Language Week in March. If you don’t understand sign, you can add the subtitles by clicking on the CC button. 

Though British Sign Language (BSL) was recognised as an official language back in 2003, there’s still more work to be done in order for the language to have legal status. Legal status would encourage the creation of more inclusive action plans across the UK, to promote, protect and safeguard the language, culture and people within the d/Deaf community.

Engage a little more: Check out this very cool story from Chris Fonseca about BSL and his deaf identity: 

Or here you can see some deaf poetry from Zoe McWhinney, with a really thought-provoking piece called ‘Illegitimacy’, 10 mins in:

Learn:

Do you want to learn British Sign Language? Check out this Deaf-led organisation in London called ‘Remark!’ They have brilliant deaf instructors, teaching all levels: Learn BSL – Remark! 

Perhaps you’d like to download an app to learn a few signs. We recommend these: 

BSL Alphabet  https://www.signsolutions.uk.com/elearning/bsl-alphabet-app/ 

Sign BSL https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.signbsl.signbsl&hl=en_GB 

BSL Fingerspelling https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/british-sign-language-finger/id389417770

It was the European Day of Speech and Language Therapy on the 6th March 2021. The theme for this year was Telepractice and Digital Technologies within Speech and Language Therapy.

When the national lockdown began in March 2020, our Hackney SLT team began a careful but swift transition to offering remote services. This involved enlisting a team of teletherapy ‘champions’, creating a webinar series, negotiating with our NHS Trust on use of different platforms, developing and analysing a team survey on our adaptation to virtual practice and setting up a new service delivery approach for virtual sessions.                                      

We continued to work on this aspect of our service through the summer and autumn terms, so were in a position in January to be able to roll out a whole series of virtual group therapy sessions this spring from Shape Coding™ to Zones of Regulation™ to DLD and Me™. We received referrals for 99 children and were able to offer places to 60 across 29 schools, while the remaining children joined a waiting list. Twenty of our SLTs facilitated the groups and were aided by eight student SLTs on placement. Each group involved a careful screening process followed by a 6-12 week block of weekly group therapy.

Positives of running the groups included being able to work with children and young people from multiple settings, parents and family members having an easy opportunity to get involved in therapy, and opportunities for newly qualified SLTs to shadow more experienced colleagues. Challenges included getting to grips with the various platforms and newly acquired tech skills, and dealing with the logistics of group members being both in settings and at home.

We’ve had some really positive parent feedback, for example:

-Parent describing a young person’s response to a virtual DLD and Me group.

We are excited about the continuing development of this new branch of our service, and look forward to exploring ways to best integrate virtual sessions within our existing clinical pathways and service delivery models.

By Speech and Language Therapists Jenny Ray, Lydia Kijowska, Maya Dytch, Frances White and Caroline McCallum.

It’s Children’s Mental Health Week from 1^st – 7^th February.

There are strong links between speech, language and communication skills and mental health.  Communication skills are important for our general well-being and mental health.  If a child or young person struggles to communicate this can affect their quality of life, and impact on their mood and emotions.  Good communication skills are a protective factor against mental health difficulties.

If you are concerned about your child’s speech, language and communication it’s important to seek help early.  This can be through contacting Speech and Language Therapy directly or talking with the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator for your child’s school.

There are also ways you can support your child to develop their ability to understand and talk about their emotions.  Some top tips include:

• When you read books or watch a TV programme or film talk about how characters may be feeling.  For example, ‘how do you think X feels? I think he might be feeling worried’.  Draw attention to clues that help you work out how the character is feeling such as their facial expression, what they say or the situation.
• Help your child to put their feelings into words.  For example, ‘I wonder if you are feeling a bit excited right now’
• Support your child to extend their use of specific emotion words.  For example, ‘were you feeling sad or disappointed?’
• Acknowledge your child’s feelings even if you may not agree.  For example, ‘I can see you are feeling angry about this’

The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families have produced a short video called ‘We All Have Mental Health’ to help explain mental health to young people:

The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families also have a range of useful resources for parents, professionals as well as children and young people.  The ‘Child in Mind’ series contains podcasts to help parents understand and manage various child and family mental health problems:  https://www.annafreud.org/parents-and-carers/child-in-mind/

Have some festive family fun with this Christmas-themed board game to support your child’s understanding of who, what, when, where questions.

You can down the game here.

The Hackney Speech and Language Therapy team has created a Holiday Countdown Calendar to help your child understand how long the holiday lasts for and when they need to go back to school. It can help prepare your child for starting school again and settle back in to the school routine. You can download the calendar here.

Happy Holidays!

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, Get Hackney Talking would like to share a blog post from I Can, the children’s communication charity, which highlights the links between mental health and speech, language and communication skills. You can read the article here.