Providing intervention

This section aims to assist speech pathologists with therapy planning for people with aphasia to achieve optimal outcomes. Follow the links for best practice statements developed in accordance with the most up-to-date research and expert opinion.

Preface: This section provides an overview of aphasia intervention. This task is challenging due to the large number of available studies. An added challenge is the large variability in study quality and design. As such, we have decided to provide an overview of the evidence already synthesised in the form of reviews.

We aim to provide up-to-date information on the best, current synthesis of aphasia intervention.  In some instances (e.g. the overall effectiveness of speech therapy for aphasia), this evidence is based on Cochrane reviews. Whilst the ideal might be to base conclusions of all interventions on systematic reviews of high quality randomised control trials (RCT), it is acknowledged that a range of evidence would be excluded if limited to this approach.  Therefore, it is recognised that systematic reviews examining whatever studies constitute the ‘best current evidence’ are appropriate to include (Beeson & Robey, 2006). As noted by Marshall et al. (2011), a range of  reviews methods should be welcomed in the field of speech pathology, at least as an interim measure.

Where available, systematic reviews are provided. In the absence of systematic reviews, non-systematic reviews are described. The type of review described is listed under each title.

More details of individual studies can be found on the Evidence-Based Review of Stroke Rehabilitation website. These reviews are periodically updated and provide in-depth information on current stroke evidence with one chapter dedicated to aphasia intervention.

In this section you will find best practice statements, resources and information that focuses on:

1. Access to aphasia therapy - including who should be offered therapy and time frames for intervention.
2. Types of aphasia therapy - including information on various individual therapy approaches such as Constraint Induced Language Therapy (CILT), discourse therapy, multimodal therapy, noun and verb retrieval therapy and sentence processing therapy. 
3. Service delivery options - including information on different methods of service delivery such as group therapy, computer based treatments, telerehabilitation and trained volunteers.