Health-related quality of life in people with severe aphasia.

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQL) measures are increasingly used to help us understand the impact of disease or disability on a person's life and to measure the effectiveness of interventions. A small number of studies have looked at perceived HRQL in people with mild or moderate aphasia. They report that reduced HRQL is associated with low psychological well-being and depression, reduced activity levels and high levels of communication disability.

Teaching and learning speech and language therapy skills: the effectiveness of classroom as clinic in speech and language therapy student education.

Background: Terms such as 'clinical intuition' have often been applied to the practice of speech and language therapy. Various authors have aimed to make the process of therapy practice more explicit, and it is argued that recently developed descriptive/analytic frameworks have the potential to engender the critical mindset necessary for student speech and language therapists to become good reflective practitioners, with the potential for enhancing clinical education.

Aims: To investigate whether and how aspects of clinical skills education could be usefully addressed in an academic, as opposed to a clinical, setting.

Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life Scale-39 (SAQOL-39): evaluation of acceptability, reliability, and validity.

Background And Purpose: Health-related quality of life (HRQL) is a key outcome in stroke clinical trials. Stroke-specific HRQL scales (eg, SS-QOL, SIS) have generally been developed with samples of stroke survivors that exclude people with aphasia. We adapted the SS-QOL for use with people with aphasia to produce the Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life Scale (SAQOL).

Values in practice and practising values.

Unlabelled: This paper first explores evidence that speech-language pathologists are experiencing dissatisfaction with their roles and then argues that one source of dissatisfaction may be in a mismatch between personal and organisational values. In order to clarify their notion of values, the authors next present a model that outlines various levels at which values operate in therapy and show how values pervade all aspects of practice. The paper then offers some practical examples of how a new organisation has tried to address overtly the implementation of values in practice, with suggestions for how other practitioners might go about making their own personal and organisational values more explicit.

Measuring quality of life in people with aphasia: the Stroke Specific Quality of Life Scale.

Assessing health related quality of life (HRQOL) in people with communication disabilities is a challenge in health related research. Materials used to assess HRQOL are often linguistically complex and their mode of administration usually does not facilitate people with communication disabilities to give their experiences. We are currently running a medium scale study (80 participants) which aims to explore the HRQOL of people with long-term aphasia and to assess the psychometric properties and the acceptability of the Stroke Specific Quality of Life Scale (SS-QOL) (Williams et al.