Speech Therapy Checklist

[KisstheTeapot14]

Going to ask for speech therapy referral for DS aged 8. School and us are concerned about various things - unclear speech, struggling to say/sequence sounds in words when reading aloud, sequencing problems when telling story/repeating himself.

Eating and drinking slight issues (has dyspraxia so may have element of verbal dyspraxia too am thinking) - messy and tends to be choky.

Have been told to see GP to do this. Any good checklists I can use to identify all the things going on/what to look for - makes it easier to be clear when I see GP.

SALT here - you don't need a GP referral for talking/speech support. You can self refer - just phone up your local SALT department and ask them what their process is. For eating and drinking you might get lucky with a GP referral but in my team you need to be under a paediatrician and they need to make the referral. Not because we're being obstructive but because the issues with feeding need to be seen within the context of the bigger medical picture.

I think it was school who did the referral for us - not the GP at all. Paediatrician prodded it along gently when we were seeing them for a general dyspraxia diagnosis too.

I made a list of the kind of sound substitutions I'd noticed DD2 did and sounds she couldn't say at all, plus there's a lot of grammatical wonkiness in her speech in general that I also noted down... I'll be honest though - NHS SALT were fuck all use and we waited a year for the course of sessions promised, and then got discharged after 2 of them.