Inpatient Functional Communication Interview: Screening, Assessment, and Intervention
About this eBook
*Screening Questionnaire. Designed to identify patients who have difficulty communicating about their healthcare and will need support to communicate with healthcare providers in hospital.
*Inpatient Functional Communication Interview (IFCI). A semi-structured interview that the SLP conducts at the patient’s bedside. During the interview, the SLP investigates how well the patient can communicate in everyday healthcare communication activities. If the SLP and patient have difficulty communicating, the clinician investigates if any communication supports or strategies enable successful communication.
*Impairment Rating Scales. These assist the SLP to rate their initial clinical impressions of the patient’s speech intelligibility, spoken language, and cognitive-communicative function. Each rating scale provides descriptions of speech, language, and cognitive-communicative function on a five-point scale ranging from no impairment to complete impairment.
*Environmental Questionnaires (EQs). The set of EQs assist SLPs and other healthcare professionals to screen the communicative environment for factors influencing patient-provider communication in their setting. Once the factors that influence patient-provider communication have been identified, SLPs and other healthcare professionals may be better informed and more able to systematically address these factors to develop communicatively accessible hospital services.
About the author
Robyn O’Halloran, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Disicpline of Speech Pathology at La Trobe Univeristy, and Research Speech Pathologist at St Vincent’s Hospital, in Melbourne, Australia. She completed her Bachelor of Applied Science (Speech and Hearing ) at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, and her M.Phil and PhD in Speech Pathology at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Linda Worrall, PhD, B. Sp. Therapy, is a Professor Emerita of Speech Pathology at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia and current Chairperson of the Australian Aphasia Association. She completed her undergraduate degree in speech pathology at The University of Queensland but then completed her PhD in the Stroke Research Unit in Nottingham, UK.
Deborah Toffolo, M. App. Sci., B. App. Sci., is a Practicing Speech Pathologist and Rehabilitation Case Manager at Access Brain Injury Services in Sydney, Australia. She established this service in 1995, in response to the need for specialized rehabilitation services for people with traumatic brain injury following discharge from hospital.
Chris Code, PhD, MA, LCST, is Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a licenced speech and language therapist and a Chartered Psychologist. He is currently Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Exeter, England, past Foundation Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Sydney, past Research Manager and Regional Development Advisor for Speakability, UK, visiting Professor at the Universities of Bremen, Germany, Linkoping, Sweden and Louisiana at Lafayette, USA.
