Welcome to our bright and shiny website!

Clinical Colleagues Confidential is an on-line community for Speech Language Pathologists.
We have featured articles and opinion pieces that we hope you enjoy, but our main focus is to provide a forum for communication disorder specialists to communicate with each other – a virtual water cooler for professionals to gather and chat.

Our professional lives are spent in the pursuit of better communication.   We study speech and hearing from phonemes to conversation to learn everything possible about the process of expressing and receiving language.  The research into communication is fascinating in its own regard.  But, we get to take research further.  We bring it back to reality.  We use the theoretical principles in functional settings, with people who have never achieved, or who have lost the skill, which is a distinctive feature of human beings: speech.

There may be no more meaningful work than giving another person the tools to complain or the means to tell their family how much they love them or to simply proclaim to the universe, “I am!”  It is usually hard work.  It is often poignant work.  And, in our current practice settings, it is lonely work.  Like the rogue cops from ‘70s TV shows, speech language pathologists and audiologists work alone.  Even in small skilled nursing facilities and hospitals PT’s have PTA’s and OT’s have COTA’s but SLP’s are singular assignments for the most part.  Our associates in other disciplines maybe very supportive, but few share our excitement for the free floating hyoid, the semi-circular canals, or the Masako Maneuver.  Almost none of them have ever heard of Charles Van Riper or Hildred Schuell.

Who do we talk to when our compensatory strategy to circumlocute sends a ninety year old grandmotherly Broca’s aphasic into a profanity laden tirade?  What ear can we bend when a trached preschooler chokes on the ground diet we recommended?  How can we share our frustration about our Regional Supervisor, who doesn’t get it that bedside evaluations are longer than fifteen minutes, regardless of payor source?  Where do we get to have our say?

Here.  The website designed by speech language pathologists for speech language pathologists to discuss speech language pathology.

Welcome to Clinical Colleagues Confidential.