-: My name is Kayla St. Holtz,
and I'm a speech language pathologist.
So I work in two different settings within ProMedica.
I work in the acute care setting in the hospital
as well as the outpatient setting
seeing across the lifespan.
I see from the little kiddos
all the way up to adults in the hospital.
So I get to see a wide variety of people
and get to help in their rehab
as well as their diagnosis process and all of that.
In the hospital setting, I do a lot of swallowing evals,
so making sure people are safe to eat,
and then also working with their cognition
to make sure that they're safe to go home
to take care of themselves,
and giving them some compensation strategies to be safe
while eating and doing their everyday activities.
And then in the outpatient setting,
I primarily work with the pediatric population.
So that deals more heavily with their language development
and their speech production.
I think probably the biggest responsibility I have is
making sure that people are put on the most appropriate diet
and make sure that they're safe for oral intake.
So with that, trying to determine that
in the safest way possible
is going for a video fluoroscopy swallow study,
which entails them going down to radiology.
They have to eat and drink barium covered food and liquids,
and then we take an x-ray.
So in real time we see a movie of their swallow,
and then we're able to further determine
the safety of their swallow
and diet that they're able to tolerate.
So right now we're trying to grow our pediatric program
at my facility.
So we've been working on some marketing,
reaching out and networking with other agencies in the area,
and just trying to build a program that would be able to
best service the pediatric population in Lenawee County.