Aides, others can help aphasia patients improve
Expert offers these suggestions
If education managers have to teach their aides one word to remember when they’re dealing with a patient who has aphasia, it would be patience. "Be patient and give them time to learn how to speak," advises Penny Montgomery, resource director for the National Aphasia Association in New York City.
"So often we fill in the words for them because we’re impatient and we sort of know what they want to say," she says. "But that’s a real hindrance to someone who has acquired aphasia and who is trying his best to have his brain think about what he’s trying to say."
Montgomery understands how easily family members and others can become frustrated with aphasia patients because her husband had the disorder. He had a stroke at age 44 and acquired global aphasia, which meant that he had severe trouble with all forms of communication and comprehension.
"The first six months were very difficult because he hardly spoke a word," Montgomery recalls. "My name is Penny, and he called me "Paint" for six months. He got the "P" right, but that’s all he could get."
Montgomery’s husband received extensive speech therapy, and within six months he showed improvement. But that wasn’t all that helped him. Montgomery and the couple’s two children created games and flash cards to help him recover his ability to talk, read, and write.
Home health aides and caregivers could use some of these same techniques to help patients with aphasia recover their ability to communicate. Here are some tips from Montgomery and the National Aphasia Association:
• Create flash cards.
Montgomery got the idea to use flash cards from her daughter’s reading lessons at school. So she and the children made picture flash cards to show her husband when he was searching for a word. At first they used pictures and words, but when he improved they switched to using only words.
• Communicate with charades.
"We had to play charades in the beginning because of our trying to guess what he was trying to say," Montgomery says. The National Aphasia Association recommends people use gestures, facial expressions, and other physical movements to help send messages to the aphasia patient.
• Make a picture dictionary.
"We made pictures from magazines and put the word next to the picture so he could relearn that," she says. If her husband wanted something for dinner and couldn’t explain what it was, the family pulled out the picture dictionary. He might recognize and point to the picture of a chicken, although he still couldn’t say the word.
• Label household items with index cards.
Montgomery labeled the furniture and almost everything in the house with index cards to help her husband improve his reading and language skills.
• Don’t make it too easy for the patient.
As her husband improved, she encouraged him to try harder. For example, if the family was sitting at the dinner table and he wanted some broccoli, he had to ask for it instead of just pointing to it.
"You need to go back to when a child is learning to speak," Montgomery says. "We tried to encourage him to say which dish he wanted, and it might take him five minutes." If the task proved too frustrating, they’d help him out and say, "It starts with a B,’" and make sounds of the letter B.
• Use Scrabble game pieces to teach the alphabet.
"We used those little Scrabble pieces and mixed them up, and tried to have him put them in order," Montgomery says.
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