Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2005

News

Share in $4 million stuttering research grant

La Trobe University is one of five universities to share a $4.1 million National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) program grant for research on stuttering.

The grant, over five years, is the largest by the NHMRC to investigate the causes and treatments of stuttering. A major La Trobe contribution will be to investigate the development of anxiety in stuttering.

The University’s Stuttering Clinic in the School of Human Communication Sciences will be involved in a number of research areas, as well as the recruitment of participants for several projects.

Stuttering Clinic Director, Dr Susan Block, says the research will look in particular at the efficiency, access and self-management of stuttering and cover projects for both children and adults, but the main focus will be on children.

Dr Block, one of the project’s six principal investigators, says the large grant was a Federal Government acknowledgment of the detrimental effect of stuttering on children and the implications on their quality of life and well-being.

Entitled Equitable access to stuttering treatments: Developing distance and self managed treatment models, the grant will be administered by the Australian Stuttering Research Centre at the University of Sydney. Other participants are Queensland, Newcastle and Macquarie universities.

Announcing the grant, an NHMRC spokesperson said stuttering was a serious problem for many people. Effective treatments were available, but there were not enough well-funded speech pathology services, especially in rural areas, to help all who need it.

Researchers aim to determine ways to adapt existing treatments for distance learning to help rural patients who may not have access to speech pathology services. The research will also examine the effectiveness of self-management techniques to help people keep on top of their stuttering and prevent it from coming back.

Other research will look at social phobia – a form of extreme anxiety suffered by about half of the adults who stutter – and find ways to overcome it. Research in this program will also attempt to gain greater overall understanding of why people stutter.

Dr Block said this was the first time that allied health had received such a grant for program research. Such grants were usually given to medical researchers.

She said the La Trobe Clinic was involved in other stuttering research, including the impact of stuttering on adolescents, the effectiveness of student-delivered treatment of adolescents who stutter and a trial of a modified treatment – the ‘Camperdown Program'– for adults who stutter.

Health Care Award

The La Trobe University Communication Clinic stuttering program was a finalist in this year’s Primary and Community Health Network Awards for Innovation and Excellence in Primary Health Care.

The Awards – in four categories, Health Promotion; Direct Care; Organisational Development; and Outstanding Contribution in Primary and Community Health – were announced in October. The La Trobe program was in the Direct Care category.

The network promotes debate and influences policy development relating to primary and community health.