Speech and language therapist

“My role is to help patients with cleft of all ages, who have speech, language and communication needs or difficulties with eating, drinking and swallowing”

It is important that all children born with a cleft lip and palate or isolated cleft palate, are seen for assessment by a specialist speech and language therapist. When attending the cleft team appointments, parents are given information on how to support speech development from the early babbling stages and beyond.

Patients will be seen for assessment in the pre-school stage to evaluate how their speech is developing through play and interaction with the child. Assessments of their speech via speech recordings are taken at set ages to monitor their development.

As children grow and develop, they may be offered additional assessment appointments, speech and language therapy may be advised with a local team and the function of their palate may be assessed with their surgeon in a combined appointment. This can allow for potential problems to be detected and resolved.

As an adolescent patients may choose to have jaw surgery, the speech and language therapist will be involved at this stage too, to assess and evaluate speech prior to proceeding with an operation and afterwards as well." 

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