The 'art' of communication therapy

An overview of research exploring communication rehabilitation published between 2022 and 2024. There is limited research in the field so this timely review offers the clinician an insight into the available literature and the gaps that exist.

The review identified four main themes related to communication and speech rehabilitation; articulation and intelligibility, measures of function following surgical interventions, therapeutic interventions and their variability and quality of life outcomes.

Clinicians may benefit from identifying organizational, institutional, cultural, practical and data driven influences on their clinical interventions and capacity to provide person-centred communication rehabilitation. There is an ongoing need to move beyond measurement of compromise and impairment-based interventions, to explore how enhancing communicative competence using multiple rehabilitative interventions from the Speech and Language Therapist may improve holistic outcomes for people with head and neck cancer.