My name is Kelly Belts,
and I am a Certified Speech Language Pathologist.
So, the facility I work at is broken up into
a dementia unit, a short term rehab,
which those are the individuals that come
from the acute care setting,
with potential that their goal is to go home.
So they'll come in for additional rehab services.
And then we have a long term care side,
which is those individuals who unfortunately
that has become their home at this stage of their life.
But for my day, usually runs about eight to four.
Eight thirty to four thirty,
depending on what time I get in.
I see individuals for breakfast and lunch rounds,
especially if they're on a speech program
for swallowing dysphagia.
Then I kind of fill in those gaps in between
those two rounds with cognitive therapy,
if we have someone coming in who's had a stroke,
just some memory loss, kind of doing
preventative measures with dementia population.
There's care plan meetings, which we meet with families.
Nursing conversations.
So it really could be an ailment at first or a diagnosis.
Perfect example is someone comes in and
they might have lost their dentures
when they're in the hospital.
And they are like
oh well I don't understand why they need it.
Well, my job hopefully is to have them
be educated on well, you know,
Uncle Joe was having his dentures in the hospital
and then all of a sudden they lost them,
and now he's having a hard time chewing his food.
It's, you know, my job is to keep your uncle safe.
I don't want him choking,
I want him to have a good intake.
What we could work on is trying to find the best
level of diet for him at this given moment.
Until either they find his teeth and they bring 'em,
or you know, he doesn't have them any more,
and this is where we'll have to be.
So it really all depends on what level
I'd be working with someone and what I'd be based on,
but it's really just trying to get a good comradery
between family and myself,
and if they have questions
I always leave an open door policy.
If you have any questions as we're going through
please call me, please let me know,
we'll work together on it.
I found that once you do that, rather than just
going in, hi I'm Kelly,
I'm the speech language pathologist,
this is what we're here for,
and we don't give that education,
there could be more resistance in that.