The Outpatient Speech Therapy department — part of UF Health Rehabilitation in Jacksonville — integrates speech and language therapy with other rehabilitation services, to offer comprehensive care tailored to meet your needs.

You will work with specialists who use research-based therapies to offer a brighter future for adults and children with speech, language, swallowing and cognition disorders. These highly trained speech-language pathologists often collaborate with physical and occupational therapists as well as other hospital physicians to provide you and your family with the best possible outcomes.

What is speech-language pathology?

Speech-language pathology is the treatment of speech, language, cognitive-communication and swallowing disorders. Specialists provide assessment and plan therapies to improve or correct these disorders, which can be caused by a wide range of conditions including stroke, brain injury and hearing loss as well as neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis or ALS among others.

Conditions we treat

Our therapists treat a wide variety of conditions:

• Aphasia: loss of ability to understand or express speech
• Dysarthria: difficulty or unclear articulation of speech
• Dysphagia: difficulty swallowing
• Memory deficits: confusion, impaired memory or reduced awareness
• Post-laryngectomy: loss of voice after removal of some or all of the larynx
• Traumatic brain injury: damage to the brain caused by a sudden injury such as a blow, bump, or jolt to the head
• Voice disorders: changes in the sound of the voice that can be caused by infections, growths due to disease or irritants that injure the vocal cords or lead to nodules or polyps

Treatments we provide

Treatments strategies vary based on the nature of the communication problems and the level or type of injuries. Specialists may use exercises to increase breath support and improve muscle power in the jaw, mouth and throat. Other exercises may be used to help regulate the pace of speech and help you improve enunciation. In general, your therapist will determine the types of skills that you need to improve your communication and prepare a rehabilitation plan to help you reach those goals.

Our speech-language pathologists are licensed in SPEAK OUT!® for patients with Parkinson’s disease and related neurological disorders. We also offer a speech-language pathologist certified in vital stimulation for dysphagia and tracheoesophageal or voice prosthesis fitting for patients following laryngectomy. They perform modified barium swallow studies and fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing to assist in examination of an individual's ability to swallow.