Speech Language Pathologist, HealthPro

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.