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What’s Dys all about? – our Ryde Speech Pathologists speak fluent Dys ….
During the week of the 24 August – 30 August 2025, we celebrated National Speech Pathology Week! The aim of this week is to raise awareness of communication and swallowing disorders affecting over 1.1million Australians. At Ryde Hospital, our Speech Pathology team plays a vital role in patient care, providing expert assessment and management of adult communication and swallowing difficulties. They support patients across a wide range of conditions, including: ✓ Dysphagia - Difficulties swallowing. If left untreated, dysphagia can have serious consequences, including choking and aspiration pneumonia (chest infections). Ryde Hospital has access to gold- standard dysphagia assessment tools, including Flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing (FEES) which can be performed onsite by credentialed Speech Pathologists and Video- Fluoroscopic Swallow Study (VFSS) via the Royal North Shore Hospital clinic. ✓ Aphasia - Language impairment caused by damage to the language centers in the brain. About 1 in 3 people who have a stroke will have aphasia. Symptoms can vary, including word finding difficulties (anomia), difficulties understanding others, trouble using full sentences or talking excessively but not making sense. ✓ Cognitive Communication Impairment - When changes to thinking skills impact the way a person interacts with others. Traumatic Brain Injury and strokes on the right side of the brain or in the frontal lobes are common causes. A person with a cognitive communication impairment may have difficulties knowing when to change topics, get distracted easily, have difficulty sequencing their ideas or laugh and cry at inappropriate times. ✓ Dysarthria - Difficulties using the muscles of the lips and tongue to make speech sounds (e.g. slurred speech). Sound errors are consistent. It can be very difficult to understand a person with dysarthria, especially over the phone. ✓ Dyspraxia (Apraxia of Speech) - Difficulties coordinating the muscles of the lips and tongue to make speech sounds. People with Apraxia of Speech will have inconsistent sound errors, have more difficulty with longer words/phrases and can often be seen moving their mouth a lot before they start speaking. They can usually say common phrases such as “Hi, how are you?” with no trouble, because these phrases are so well-rehearsed that they require less effort to coordinate compared to a new sentence.
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