Prevention

Welcome to the prevention committee page where you will find information about children's communication skills.

A poster is available describing the acquisition of receptive and expressive language skills.

The poster is available in the following languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Slovenian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh. 88

Leaflets

If you are interested in how to facilitate your child's language development, leaflets are available for the different stages as outlined below:

0 - 12 months

1 - 2 years

2 - 3 years

3 - 4 years

You will find the leaflets, in several languages, on the following page 88

Questionnaire

A language development questionnaire has been designed to help you discover language delays as soon as possible.

The questionnaire is available in the following languages: 88

Further information:

Definition of Prevention

The committee started by adopting the definition of prevention drawn up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1948. The WHO identifies three successive stages covering the means to be set up to prevent pathologies, therapy and, if possible, the social reintegration of patients:

Primary prevention: This stage of prevention covers all activities designed to ‘reduce’ the instances of an illness in a population and thus to reduce, as far as possible, the risk of new cases appearing; in speech and language therapy this mainly covers information and health education of a population, as well as training all those who have a role to play with the population in question;

Secondary prevention: This covers activities aimed at `reducing the prevalence of an illness in a population and thus to reduce its duration’; in speech and language therapy this mainly concerns identification and early screening;

Tertiary prevention: This aims ‘to reduce the incidence of chronic incapacity or recurrences in a population, and thus to reduce the functional consequences of an illness’; in speech and language therapy , this relates to care provided, i.e. therapy, various rehabilitation techniques and intervention designed to assist the patient to return to educational, family, professional, social and cultural life.

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Report of the Prevention Committee
for the General Assembly 2003

Poster project

Since 2000 we have been working with production of a poster about prevention of language problems in children 0-4 years old. Many of the European countries have now finalized the poster. Some countries made it into a poster, using the model with pictures and the same lay-out in different languages. Other countries, for instance Germany, made it a leaflet, without pictures. In Germany they printed it in 100 000 copies and most of them are already given away! A real success!

The poster is now available in English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Finnish(?) and Estonian(?).

We have also decided to translate the poster into minority languages for immigrants. Until now we are ready with Turkish (Germany), Chinese? (Ireland) but we have the intention to go on with Arabic and Thai.

Checklist - language development

Last year we started a further development of the poster project. From our Swedish colleagues and researchers from University of Lund we adopted the idea about a questionnaire/checklist for parents of children up to 18 months old. The questionnaire consists of questions about interaction, play behaviour, comprehension and expression; important factors to predict language development/difficulties. It is intended for use by paediatricians and Health Visitors/ Public Health nurses as a help to discover language delays as early as possible.

Leaflet project

A leaflet concerning language development together with advice on how to stimulate children's language has been produced. The first part is about children aged 0-1 year old. The aim is to give parents a little more information about language acquisition and their role in interaction with the child. The leaflet is meant to be only one or two pages. We are planning to continue with leaflets also about language development from 1-2, 2-3, 3-4 years olds.

Communication aids project

We have conducted a survey within the European Union about provision of communication aids to adults with acquired communication difficulties. Having a communication disability is not often recognised in society and in general it is a hidden handicap whose importance/significance is not fully appreciated. Having a communication aid may allow someone to return to work, be able to communicate with his/her relatives and friends and re-integrate into society.

Hypothesis: There is not equality of access to communication aids for adults with Acquired communication difficulties throughout the European Community.
We decided to design a questionnaire to gather the necessary information. The questionnaire was drawn up and sent to CPLOL members (and observers) asking them to collect the information from their colleagues in the Member States and observer countries. The questionnaire has 4 sections which reflect the objectives:

1. To identify the situation concerning access to the provision of communication aids for the communication disabled (adults) in Europe.

2. To make recommendations about the provision of communication aids (for adults)

3. To disseminate the information gathered to all speech and language therapists/ logopedists as an information (database) source of what equipment is available which would be of benefit to their communication disabled clients.
The information was collated and analysed by the subgroup and results shown graphically.

As we hypothesised there were considerable differences between the countries in the method of funding and the ease of obtaining funding. The results will be presented in a report from the subgroup. The report will be presented to the European Union with recommendations as well as to the national logopedic associations.