Personalization of Patient–Provider Communication Across the Life Span

Abstract

People with disabilities are more likely to be hospitalized and use health care services than people without disabilities. They also report negative experiences interacting with health care providers during these encounters, placing them at risk for preventable adverse medical events, poor quality of life, and dependence on others. Fortunately, providers and people with communication disabilities can take steps to improve these interactions by personalizing and implementing communication supports to empower people with communication disabilities to actively participate in these interactions and improve outcomes. The purpose of this article is to describe strategies that health care providers can use to develop and implement personalized communication supports for children and adults with communication disorders during health care interactions. Additional strategies are provided to guide people with disabilities as well as their community/school providers and families to prepare for health care interactions. Case examples are provided to illustrate use of these strategies in acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, and outpatient settings. The use of emerging training tools (e.g., video visual scene displays) and augmentative or alternative communication partner training formats (e.g., just-in-time training) are also presented as future directions to expedite learning and implementation of communication supports in fast-paced and time-limited health care interactions.

Personalising Support through Communication between People with Intellectual Disabilities and their Support Workers

“…This finding about physical expression highlights the conflict between personalised communication and respecting physical boundaries. Gormley and Fager (2021) expand on AAC options for people with complex communication support needs, but do not explicitly analyse communication through physical contact. Findings about physical expression have implications for how disability support practice manages conflicting policy goals, while prioritising communication.…”

“…The data were organised in NVivo and analysed against Gormley and Fager's (2021) framework that influence the design and implementation of communication support. This framework consists of three dimensions (personal factors impacting the person-worker communication, environmental factors impacting the person-worker communication, strategies to personalise the person-worker communication) which we applied to the data in connection with the research question of this article.…”

Understanding How Older Adults with Communication Difficulties Access Health Services: What We Can Learn from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS)

“…There have been many calls for providing the communication accommodations needed to improve accessibility of healthcare environments, and to humanize the experience of healthcare for people with communication disorders. 13,[24][25][26][27][28][29] There are a wide range of improvements that could be made. Some of these are system-wide changes in terms of policies and procedures for identifying patients at risk for lack of communication access, ensuring that these patients are referred for services and support-particularly from speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and audiologists, and ensuring that healthcare providers have adequate time and other resources needed to support them in working productively and respectfully with this population.…”

Personalization of Language Intervention for Children and Adults With Complex Communication Needs

“…Similarly, in the next article, Babb et al (2021) describe the development of personalized visual scene display augmentative and alternative communication systems for a young adult with Down syndrome who had complex communication needs. Then, Gormley and Fager (2021) highlight personalization across health care interactions for children and adults with complex communication needs. Next, Thiessen and Brown (2021) describe the status of personalization and personal relevance in interventions for adults with aphasia and put out a call for more research in this area.…”