 Written by: Cassandra Kerr, MClSc, SLP Grace Neubauer, MS, CCC-SLP Stephanie Muñoz, MS, CCC-SLP Edited by: Erin Kamarunas, PhD, CCC-SLP Meet our Team, here. Here at TISLP we strive to provide SLPs with Evidence You Can Use to inform your clinical practice. We recognize that many of you are facing new constraints on the way you practice as a result of COVID-19. You may be limited by efforts to conserve personal protective equipment and to enforce strict infection control policies. You may be called on to use your knowledge and training to weigh the risks/benefits of our intervention in new ways. We are confident that you will continue to be a fierce advocate for your patients as you navigate this difficult situation.
To make this easier—and because we love connecting clinicians with science as efficiently as possible—we wanted to bring you the latest and most relevant research regarding COVID-19 and dysphagia. The Bad News: Although it has been recommended that dysphagia screening should be mandatory for patients with critical COVID-19 post extubation, there is literally no research specifically addressing its impact on swallow function and safety. The Good News: We can apply our existing knowledge related to dysphagia in the ICU to our current situation! To do this, we need to think critically about the symptoms of COVID-19 and the supportive therapies, and how those things might impact swallowing and aspiration risk. With this in mind, here are some of the main considerations for increased risk of dysphagia and aspiration in patients with COVID-19:
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 Written by: Caroline Gammill, SLPD, CCC-SLP, CBIS Kelly Zarifa, MA, CCC-SLP Caroline Tobias, MS, CCC-SLP Kyomi Gregory, PhD, CCC-SLP Edited by: Natalie Douglas, PhD, CCC-SLP Meet our Team, here. Editor’s Note: I think I knew that I wanted to be a speech–language pathologist by the time I was 15 years old. Twenty-five years later, I have never been so proud of our profession. Thank you for risking the health and well-being of you and your family and for providing quality services in the face of the unknown. We see you. We love you and we want to support you. We hope these blogs help to clarify some of what you’ve been seeing in the media, and if there’s another area we can explore for you, please tell us! There’s honestly nothing else we’d rather do! ~Natalie Douglas, PhD, CCC-SLP
And a disclaimer: While we’ve looked extensively for peer-reviewed, quality studies, much of our information at this point is from media reporting cases and stories—simply because the science just isn’t available yet. We link here to the original cases when possible, but it’s just too early at this point to have lots of high-quality studies! We’ll come back to insert addendums as they’re available. In the first two weeks of March, our team recognized that SLPs would be doing a lot more telepractice in the very near future, and we wanted to help. So we headed to every place we could find to pull together all the latest research on telepractice in our field, as well as all the content in our membership that was already published on telepractice. Telehealth, teletherapy, telepractice.... whatever you call it, we found the research on it for speech–language pathologists Click below to head on over to a page of our membership site. But, no worries--even if you're not yet a member, it's all free. Enjoy~  Note that from April forward, we will continue to find new research on telehealth. This link shares research only from March 2020 and earlier.
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