Overview
Initiative type
Service Improvement
Status
Deliver
Published
June 2025
Summary
Voice disorders affect up to 20% of adults, impacting communication and quality of life.
Audio-visual resources improve patient engagement, confidence, and satisfaction in voice therapy.
Dates: N/A
Implementation sites: Logan Hospital
Partnerships: N/A
This project was presented as a Poster at CEQ Showcase 2025 (PDF 361KB).
Aim
To examine the effectiveness of audio-visual voice therapy resources in enhancing patient engagement, boosting confidence in completing home practice, and ensuring overall satisfaction among patients with voice disorders.
Outcomes
- High patient engagement with using resources
- Improved patient confidence in completing home practice
- High patient satisfaction with the quality of the audio-visual resources
Background
Voice disorders can arise from a range of aetiologies, impacting up to 20% of adults. This leads to difficulties communicating, social isolation, impact on quality of life and ability to work. Speech pathology-led voice treatment is part of gold standard care to treat voice disorders and treatment programs are tailored to the individual.
Voice therapy is an abstract concept using sounds or voice placement to control the muscles in the larynx and reteach the muscles to work after injury. Standard voice therapy is offered weekly, with patients required to complete daily home practise working through treatment handouts in between their therapy sessions. Many patients struggle in between their weekly appointments to practice their therapy exercises correctly or find the tasks too overwhelming, which can impact treatment progress.
The speech pathology outpatient service at Logan Hospital provides in-person and telehealth voice therapy services to patients across Metro South Health. The outpatient speech pathology team identified the need to develop online and audio-visual resources to help support patients in between their voice therapy sessions with voice therapy practice videos and tracking tools to monitor voice changes.
Methods
A cohort of up to 40 patients diagnosed with voice disorders was recruited for this pilot study. Each participant underwent a multi-dimensional outcome measure battery at baseline and post-treatment. Patients received individualised voice therapy with a speech pathologist (either in-person or via telehealth), standard home practice resources, and access to the newly developed audio-visual therapy resources. An additional online tracking tool was provided to monitor changes in their voice between therapy sessions.
Patient experiences and perceptions were captured after using the online audio-visual resources.
Discussion
Discussion: Since the implementation of the online and audio-visual resource package, there has been a positive impact on consumer perceptions and confidence for patients with voice disorders completing home therapy programs. This package of resources can easily be expanded into the hospital or community setting as well as translated into other domains of therapy (e.g. dysphagia therapy). In future projects, clinicians should consider patients without access to electronic devices and how this is managed in session (e.g. access to paper versions of all therapy tasks and voice tracker).
Next Steps:
- Introduction of e-appts for patients who report a significant change in voice quality using the online tracking tool
- Expansion of the therapy task video library
- Review of paper resources to ensure these align with the online and audio-visual resources
References
van Leer, E. and Connor, N.P. (2012). Use of Portable Digital Media Players Increases Patient Motivation and Practice in Voice Therapy. Journal of Voice, 26(4), pp.447–453. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.05.006.
van Leer, E. and Connor, N.P. (2015). Predicting and Influencing Voice Therapy Adherence Using Social–Cognitive Factors and Mobile Video. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, [online] 24(2), pp.164–176. doi:https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_ajslp-12-0123.
Klopchin, I. (2021). Use of Video Resources in Home Programs for Voice Intervention. [online] Available at: https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/w3763c437 [Accessed 20 Nov. 2024].