03 Nov 2011
By: JOAN CHEW
Three days after insurance agent Kwek Joo Kwang celebrated his 42nd birthday, his life was turned topsy-turvy by a stroke.
He fainted in a shopping mall during his lunch hour in January 2009, and when he awoke at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH), he found he could not utter a sound or move the right side of his body.
He calmed himself, believing the loss of sensation was only temporary.
Mr Kwek, now 44, recalled: “When my wife told me the doctor had warned her that I might not be able to speak again for the rest of my life, it made me even more determined to recover.”
Recover he did, but it took months of physiotherapy and speech therapy for him to relearn the skills lost when part of his brain was damaged.
Mr Kwek said he felt like a child again – learning the alphabet, articulating syllables and training his non-dominant left hand to write.
Now, he speaks so fluently he could share his story at the Asia Pacific Life Insurance Congress in July.
He told Mind Your Body that his signature has not changed – even with his left hand – and he is able to walk unaided now. It is a triumph of hard work by both him and his therapists.
As hospitals marked Speech Therapy Day on Tuesday, they also reported putting more patients like Mr Kwek through speech therapy in recent years.
SGH, which handles more than 19,000 patient visits a year for speech therapy, has seen an 8 per cent annual increase in patient visits between 2008 and last year.
Likewise, the National University Hospital (NUH) has had a rise in speech therapy patient visits, from 8,000 in 2008 to 11,000 last year, said principal speech therapist Melisa Wooi.
Over at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), it too has had a 5 per cent annual increase in the number of referrals for speech therapy since 2009, either from inpatients or external family physicians.
Speech therapists said the spike in demand for speech therapy services is due both to an ageing population and a greater awareness of such services, which explains why there is an increase in the number of patients both young and old.
It may not indicate an actual increase in the incidence of medical conditions leading to communication impairments, said Ms Deirdre Tay, senior speech therapist at SGH.
People require speech therapy if they have medical conditions such as stroke, injuries or learning difficulties that lead to speech, language or voice problems.
Ms Sharon Wu, assistant manager of the department of speech therapy at TTSH, said in older people, degenerative brain conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia interfere with their speech.
Those under the age of 40, on the other hand, may need therapy to improve speech fluency or to pick up strategies to manage stuttering, all of which are important for vocational and academic needs, added Ms Wu.
A major area of focus is on children with autism, a group of developmental brain disorders that affect personal development and interpersonal skills. It is now believed that autistic children who are diagnosed early and given assistance – one of the ways is through speech therapy – do better, said MsWooi.
STEP-BY-STEP VIDEO GUIDE
During speech therapy, the therapist determines the cause of the disorder before setting up speech exercises for the patient.
But as the success of the therapy often depends on patients practising exercises on their own, SGH has put together a demonstration video for them to refer to at home.
When speech therapists at SGH saw how some patients, especially the older ones, were having difficulty remembering exercises they were taught or doing them incorrectly at home, they knew that instruction sheets alone were insufficient.
Therapists had to keep going over the same exercises with patients, which hampered them from making progress, said Ms Melissa Chua, head and senior principal speech therapist at SGH.
The new video guides patients step by step through exercises taught during therapy sessions, MsChua added. Patients can buy the DVDs after they have learnt the techniques.
There are 20 different exercises in the two DVDs, sold separately at $19.58 each. They are available in English, Mandarin and Malay.
Other hospitals rely on handouts and booklets with diagrams to reinforce what patients have been taught.
Ms Wu from TTSH said the speech therapist will check if patients are capable of performing the exercises before they are left on their own to practise.
TTSH is in the midst of developing audio-visual materials to facilitate the teaching of swallowing therapy, which is a form of speech therapy.
Ultimately, a large part of how well the treatment goes depends on whether patients are motivated to work on the communication skills taught and have family support, said Ms Tay.
She said: “After all, it takes two hands to clap and at least two people to hold a conversation.”
To find out more about SGH speech therapy services, call 6321-4126 or visit www.sgh.com.sg/Clinical-Departments-Centers/Speech-Therapy/Pages/speech-therapy-department.aspx.
Email: joanchew@sph.com.sg
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