Speech Therapist in an Interdisciplinary Team

Abstract

Talking about a speech therapist then and now is not the same. A lot has been changed in people’s lives and in the lives and ways of children growing up. It is rare today to have a logopat with pathology of verbal communication and articulation difficulties. Nowadays children come to you with combined difficulties where it is primary: psychotic restlessness, elements of autism, misunderstanding of orders, repetition of everything you say and unstable attention. It may take some time to start doing speech therapy treatment with a child who comes in with speech and language difficulties as the primary problem. A speech therapist really needs to be very educated in neurology, psychology, pedagogy, defectology, deafness and typhlology in order to be able within a multidisciplinary team to help a child in terms of speech and language. We drew attention to this in our research where we had applied testing in 17 segments of difficulties in children who had unformed or slowed speech development. T-test showed that after a year of work on all 17 monitored segments a statistically significant difference was found. We conclude that these children did not have the primary difficulty in the speech-language segment. The speech therapist must work with the multidisciplinary team to help parents and children in their entire development, preparing him/her for school as a communicative and socialized person.