BAS Conference - Kerry is our Rising Research Star! 🌟

The UTILISE team have been busy spreading the word about our work at international conferences over the last couple of months.

In September, Kerry presented (twice!) at the British Aphasiology Society (BAS) Conference, which was held in London at UCL Queen Square. She spoke about outcomes of our pilot trial, both qualitative and quantitative, which we ran earlier in the year. We would like to thank all the participants of the pilot trial for their work using the app and for their attendance at focus groups. These participants gave us valuable insight into their experiences and shared their suggestions for improving the app. Kerry presented these insights as part of her presentations, highlighting the importance of developing effective remote therapy options to maximise dose potential for patients.

Kerry Dathan at the British Aphasiology Society Conference with her Rising Research Star award.

We would also like to thank the BAS team for giving us the opportunity to present our work. It was a terrific 3-day event with lots of fascinating talks, including some from service users. UTILISE team member Fern also presented a poster, sharing some outcomes from our in-person therapy trial.

We are very proud that Kerry was awarded the “Rising Research Star” award for her contributions to the conference. She is, without doubt, already a star, and has a bright research career ahead of her.

Well done, Kerry! A true asset to the team.

ASLTIP "Therapy Talks"

Professor Rosemary Varley at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

The UTILISE team are very grateful to the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) group for having us at their Therapy Talks event last week!

Professor Rosemary Varley, principal investigator of the UTILISE project, delivered a talk titled: “What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””.

She gave a whistle-stop introduction to construction grammar, and spoke of how this theory informs our novel behavioural intervention targeting sentence rehabilitation in post-stroke aphasia.

Construction grammar suggests that we are able to store and access groups of words as single units, particularly if these phrases or sentences are “high frequency” (used often), for example: “I don’t know”.

This explains how someone with severe agrammatic expressive aphasia may be still be able to produce some grammatically correct utterances amidst otherwise syntactically disordered speech.

Using this idea of frequency, we are hoping to improve the accessibility and flexibility of these chunks in post-stroke aphasia.

“What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””

Dr Anna Volkmer at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

Our UCL colleague, Dr Anna Volkmer, also delivered a terrific, and topical, presentation about Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), which is a language-led dementia, called: ““Will you still need me when I’m 65?” Dementia, language and speech and language therapy interventions”.

Anna raised the importance of taking a bespoke, person-centred approach to speech and language therapy.

For more of Anna’s work, see her recently published article: “Principles and philosophies for speech and language therapists working with people with primary progressive aphasia: an international expert consensus”.