This past week brought some exciting new developments!
Monday was no ordinary admin day. In search for a video on feeding babies with cleft lip and palate to add to our Friday presentation, we found a great animated video created by Smile Train, an NGO we later found out supports funding for cleft surgeries at some of our hospital settings. We are keen to make a feeding video as well but in Khmer. So we emailed Smile Train for permission to create a Khmer voice-over for the original copy and they agreed! Even more exciting– Today (Monday, 9th November), we have a meeting with Smile Train as they are interested in supporting funding for SLT in Cambodia! We are eager to hear what they have to say and how we can work together to continue raising awareness for SLT while we are here. Follow this link to watch the video we hope to create a Khmer version of!
On Tuesday, we saw Samnang at Children’s Surgical Centre. The twins weren’t able to make it to the therapy session again, but we saw two new cleft kiddies for a speech assessment. This gave us an opportunity to focus on Samnang’s clinical skills for carrying out assessments. He’s already great at asking the right questions for a case history and has quite good instincts in terms of appropriate decision-making, but we wanted to teach him the importance of introducing the session and informing clients of exactly why they are at the clinic and what will occur. A lot of people don’t understand the purpose of speech and language therapy here so it’s our goal to emphasize the importance of what we are doing for their children. We also built up his skills in assessing speech sounds by teaching him the importance of testing for stimulability of a sound on its own if the child is not able to produce it in a word during assessment as this informs the approach we will take in therapy. He proved to be a very receptive and quick learner, and by the time the second child came in for assessment, he was independently introducing the session and feeding back to us the specific difficulties the child had with production of the sounds. Overall, he has been a great guy to work with—though we still struggle to get him to use his email!!
On Wednesday, we went into Military Hospital to see the 5-year-old boy we first met when we arrived in Cambodia. Mom travelled far from Kampot province to have his hearing checked at All Ears followed by a second therapy session with us. We were happy to see good results from his audiology appointment reporting normal hearing. We were concerned he may have hearing difficulties because in our last session he was having difficulty distinguishing sounds. These good results meant that we could continue on with therapy that day. This time around, he did much better receptively discriminating the difference in sounds so we could move on to working on his production of them! In this session, a big focus was to train mom up in the facilitation of both the listening and production activities of his target sounds. Mom was an excellent student and we all had a lot of fun watching the boy crash toy cars towards the sound he heard when getting it correct. By the end of the session, mom felt confident enough to use the advice and skills she had learned in order to apply them independently to work with her son at home and said she wouldn’t need to come for another session. We were glad that she was happy with the tools we gave her to help her son at home as it was difficult for her to make the trip out to Phnom Penh so often.
The Friday clinic at National Pediatric Hospital was quite a whirlwind this past week! We saw many more children with language difficulties and had a few extra people in the room than usual. Alin, who is a doctor but has worked as a speech adviser with our project in past years, had returned from her 3-month SLT course in Taiwan and was back at the clinic seeing patients that day as well as Dr. Vanna, our speech adviser Chanthy, and Lauren and I. So needless to say, it was a full house with lots of kiddies running around. Our supervisors from City University who oversee the project came near the end of clinic and we all had a chance to properly meet Alin and discuss her experience in Taiwan. She was very enthusiastic about the wealth of information she had gained in the 3 months and expressed interest in being a fully certified SLT in Cambodia—Very exciting considering the role of SLT is virtually non-existent out here! Chanthy also expressed how much she has loved learning about SLT and how she would very much like to carry-on working as a speech adviser when we leave—so we have two very keen people who will hopefully build on their SLT skills together and continue providing services after we go!
Our supervisors gave us some great tips as to how Lauren and I should continue training Chanthy and Alin and what our next steps should be in promoting the development of SLT. They also attended our training later that day at One-to-One. We were happy to see that everyone from last week was back to learn more and even more pleased to see a few new faces. For last week’s training, we taught about feeding in CLP and syndromes associated with CLP. Training is a brand new experience for Lauren and I, and it was a bit intimidating but also encouraging to have a supervisor there who had taught us in uni lectures and was now watching us teach!
Well a new week has begun and we are looking forward to what’s to come. Hoping to have more exciting news to report next week!
Learn more about past adventures from the City Cambodia team and more about cleft lip and palate on the Cleft Lip and Palate Association’s (CLAPA) web site!
Your Cleft team,
Kristin and Lauren