‘Build-Your-Own Aphasia Talk’: Increasing community awareness of aphasia

The ‘Build-Your-Own Aphasia Talk’ resource was developed in conjunction with the Australian Aphasia Association. This resource aims to address the poor community awareness of the condition aphasia.

This resource is designed to be used by speech pathologists to develop community talks on aphasia for a variety of audiences including nurses, doctors, medical students, government services, community and health services, funding bodies and high school students. The information included in this resource covers a broad range of aspects of aphasia including information about aphasia, strategies for communicating with individuals with aphasia, and support groups and services for individuals with aphasia and their families. The information is based on quality research and has been adapted to discuss topics in simple and easy to understand language.

The resource consists of PowerPoint slides and suggested scripts to use when delivering a presentation. Each slide also includes a comprehensive list of additional resources relevant to each specific slide, such as websites, web-videos, blogs and journal articles which may be useful during a presentation. Key references are also contained within the notes section of each slide, and can be referred to if more information is required.

It is recommended that a person with aphasia is involved in the community presentation to share their personal experience of having aphasia. Audiences felt their understanding of the impact of aphasia was significantly increased when they could hear personal experiences of aphasia.

Three example presentations designed for a community health centre, a funding body and the police are included to demonstrate how presentations can be created using the main ‘Build-Your-Own Aphasia Talk’ resource and example evaluation forms have been included for collecting feedback from audiences.

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The ‘Build-Your-Own Aphasia Talk’ resource was developed by 4th year Speech Pathology students at La Trobe University (Amy Porter, Bryan Chan, Caitlin Wise, Erica Tilley, Lucy Sweeney and Natallie Moussa). It was created in collaboration with the Victorian branch of the Australia Aphasia Association (AAA), under the supervision of Dr Robyn O’Halloran (La Trobe University).