-: My name's Julia Hershey.
I work at Health Pro, well Brinton Woods Arlington West
in Baltimore, Maryland as a speech pathologist.
The group of people that I work with are elderly people
or people in rehab settings.
So we work on anything from cognition
to swallowing
to speech, I mean working on expression,
comprehension, everything.
People who work with speech pathologists
can be anyone who have had a traumatic brain injury
or a stroke or other medical conditions
that may have altered their cognition in any way.
Also, it could be just typically aging people
who can't really eat or swallow like they used to.
So just general weakening of the jaw
and the swallowing muscles or someone who has dementia
or Alzheimer's who needs to work on cognitive functioning
as far as safety awareness
and making sure that they're safe at home
or whatever setting that they live in.
As we typically age, a lot of times
either we lose our teeth
or we just get weaker in general
and the coordination and strength and range of motion
for your tongue and for your mouth in general
it just decreases.
So trying to teach people, for instance
if they don't have a very good lingual
or tongue range of motion or strength or coordination
teaching them to use their finger instead of their tongue
if they can't get things out of their cheeks.
Just teaching people compensatory strategies
depending on their unique situation and what they can do.
So in the nursing home setting I work on safety awareness
so if someone needs to use a cane
making sure that that cane is in
a reasonable distance from their bed
or walker, whatever it may be.
Working on sequencing for transfers
so where your hand is supposed to go.
Thinking about if someone doesn't hear you the first time
what can you do to try and make them
understand you the second time
using over articulation, speaking louder, things like that.
It's a really wide range of things
which is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing it.