Speech Pathology

Speech Pathologists at CliniKids focus on supporting children’s speech, language, communication, and social skills through a range of evidence-based approaches.

Our Speech Pathologists will work closely with your child and family to set and achieve functional individualised goals in these areas:

• Social communication and play
  We support children to learn skills to build strong relationships with important people in their life. We also support families to understand their child’s communication preferences, style and needs. This may include support with sharing attention, play, advocating for themselves, conversation, and other friendship skills.
• Language skills
  We support children to understand, acquire and use language to understand the world around them and clearly express their thoughts and ideas.
• Total Communication Approach and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
  Some children prefer using a total communication approach. In addition to supporting verbal communication, our Speech Pathologists encourage the use of multi modal strategies such as use of pictures, gesture, and body language. We also use specialist knowledge to assess, prescribe and support children to use aided (e.g. speech generating devices or picture systems) and unaided forms of AAC (e.g. signing).
• Speech sound skills
  A child’s speech sound skills affect how they are understood by others. Our Speech Pathologists work directly with your child to improve your child’s ability to produce and combine speech sounds so they can clearly communicate with others. To have the best outcomes a child generally needs to be motivated to work on this type of goal. It may be appropriate to support foundation communication skills before specific sounds.
• Mealtimes
  Eating, drinking and mealtimes are an important part of your child’s daily routine and can influenced by many factors. We work in a multidisciplinary family-centred way to support your child to have more enjoyable, independent, and safe mealtimes.
• Understanding an autism diagnosis
  Our Speech Pathologists can support you and your child to learn more about their autistic identity, neurodiversity and how to advocate for their communication preferences in everyday situations. This is important for many children and has positive benefits for wellbeing.

Our Speech Pathologists also deliver:

• Paediatric Autism Communication Therapy (PACT): PACT is an evidence-based program that works in partnership with caregivers of children with social-communication delays (primarily autistic children) to support their social communication skills. At CliniKids, PACT is available to children aged 2-8 years experiencing social communication challenges.

If you're interested in hearing more about Speech Pathology at CliniKids, please submit an online enquiry to us via the below link.

 Submit an online enquiry