British Aphasiology Society International Conference

The British Aphasiology Society (BAS) is pleased to announce that the International Conference 2023 will be hosted at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London.

The conference will be run as a hybrid event, with both in-person and online attendance available. The theme of our conference will be ‘Living well with aphasia’.

The conference will be held on 13th, 14th, and 15th September. The first day will be dedicated to Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and the latter two days will be dedicated to Aphasia. This is first time that PPA will be allocated an entire day on the conference programme.

The conference will offer the opportunity to learn about clinically relevant research and contemporary clinical practice in a variety of formats. This will include posters, lightning talks and presentations from clinicians, researchers, tertiary organisations, and, most importantly, people with lived experience.

Registration

Please note that all the face to face places for the 14th and 15th of September are now sold out. However, if you would still like to attend the conference, we have plenty of online spaces still available.

Delegates attending the conference are required to be a member of BAS. Once you have registered for the conference, please email your BAS membership number to uclh.enquiry.therapy.courses@nhs.net 

To become a member of BAS please visit the BAS membership website. To find your membership number, just log in to the BAS membership site

Registration is available now. An early bird price will be available for in-person attendance until 15th June 2023

PLEASE NOTE THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO ATTEND DIFFERENT DATES THAN THE ONES SHOWN FOR THE ONE- AND TWO-DAY PURCHASE OPTIONS.

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO STATE YOUR CHOSEN DATE(S), 

EMAIL uclh.enquiry.therapy.courses@nhs.net

Keynote Speakers:

Day one (Wednesday 13th September):

                            Professor Jason Warren

Title: An overview of primary progressive aphasia – from proteins to poetry

Summary:

In the 40 years since their modern rediscovery, the ‘language-led dementias’ have transformed our picture of aphasia and selective neural system vulnerability to degenerative proteinopathies. However, despite considerable clinical and research attention, these remain essentially mysterious diseases, presenting unsolved challenges for neurobiological understanding, diagnosis and most poignantly, treatment. In this talk, I will present a personal perspective on the primary progressive aphasias based on two decades of work with the Queen Square cognitive clinic and research cohort and the national Primary Progressive Aphasia Support Group. I will outline a practical roadmap for diagnosing PPA, spotlight issues (such as central auditory impairment) that raise difficulties for the currently standard picture of these diseases and describe recent progress toward symptom-led staging. I will argue that successful management of PPA needs ultimately to span the gap from pathogenic proteins to the poetry of lived experience - it will depend both on the identification of pathophysiological mechanisms and novel biomarkers of communication failure, and treatment strategies informed by a personalised roadmap of the illness.

Biography:

Jason Warren grew up in Adelaide, Australia where he completed his early medical training. He moved to the UK in 1999 as the Australasian Fellow to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, where he trained in cognitive neurology and dementia with Martin Rossor in the Dementia Research Centre at UCL’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology, which has been his academic home ever since. Following completion of a PhD in auditory functional imaging at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (2005), he was appointed consultant neurologist to the National Hospital and established the Brain Behaviour Group within the Dementia Research Centre principally to study the interface of hearing, speech and dementia, using cognitive neuropsychology, physiological recordings and structural and functional neuroimaging. He has been Professor of Neurology at UCL since 2014 and jointly runs the Specialist Cognitive Disorders Clinic at the National Hospital. Special interests include the progressive aphasias, auditory and emotional cognition in dementia, the neurology of music in dementia and functional imaging of neurodegenerative diseases.

                                                       Professor Maya Henry

Title: Interventions to maximize communication and quality of life in primary progressive aphasia

Summary:

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a debilitating disorder wherein speech and language deteriorate due to underlying neurodegenerative disease. PPA is now identified earlier and with greater frequency and diagnostic precision. Increasingly, patients and their families seek options for behavioural treatments to ameliorate the devastating effects on their communication, prolong speech-language skills, and maximize quality of life. Although many studies document the benefits of speech-language intervention for aphasia caused by stroke, there is a relative paucity of research examining the benefits of treatment for persons with PPA. I will give an overview of the existing evidence base, outlining findings from a recent systematic review of speech-language interventions for PPA. To highlight specific treatment options, I will present results from several studies documenting immediate and long-term outcomes from restitutive treatment in each of the clinical variants of PPA. I will also describe tailored compensatory and communication partner-focused treatment approaches, as well as complementary psychosocial interventions for patients and care partners. Taken together, the growing evidence base confirms a critical role of speech-language clinicians in the care of persons with PPA, with an array of interventions to maximize communication and quality of life.

Biography:

Dr. Henry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Neurology at the University of Texas, Austin in the United States. She is the director of the Aphasia Research and Treatment Lab and the Assistant Dean for Research in the Moody College of Communication. Her clinical and research interests lie in the nature and treatment of aphasia caused by stroke and neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Henry’s NIH-funded research investigates the immediate and long-term benefits of interventions to promote communication and quality of life in primary progressive aphasia.

Day two (Thursday 14th September):

                                                          Professor Marian Brady

Title: Winning friends and influencing people: enabling people to live well with aphasia through international collaborations

Summary:

Aphasia research infrastructure, activities and the evidence base have expanded rapidly over the last decade thanks in large part to global synergistic activities between researchers, clinicians, educators, policy makers and people with aphasia. In this talk I will review some of these advances, new insights gained and the impacts on healthcare policy before considering some remaining challenges and ways in which we might address them collaboratively.

Biography:

Marian is an experienced speech and language therapist, working in hospital, community and educational settings in Ireland and the UK before leaving the NHS as a senior stroke rehabilitation specialist to complete her PhD at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. She joined the Chief Scientist Office-funded, Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Research Unit at Glasgow Caledonian University, becoming the founding Director of the successful multidisciplinary stroke rehabilitation research programme in 2000. She chairs the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (www.aphasiatrials.org) a research network of >290 aphasia researchers across 41 countries, funded by the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia and shortlisted as the International Collaboration of the Year by Times Higher Education (2022). She is a member of the Cochrane Stroke and Aphasiology Editorial Boards, holds an Honorary Chair at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia and is a Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists Trustee. She was awarded the Robin Tavistock Award (2017) and an RCSLT Fellowship (2019) for her contribution to aphasia research and practice.

Day three (Friday 15th September):

                                                             Dr. Maren van Rijssen

Title talk: How to support (fellow) healthcare professionals in communicating with people with aphasia- and how to avoid motivation loss

Summary:

People with aphasia struggle to access good quality healthcare. Communication Partner Training (CPT) is an effective way for improving communication between healthcare professionals and people with aphasia, and CPT interventions have been developed worldwide. However, implementing CPT in healthcare centers is often not part of routine practice. SLTs and other healthcare professionals report feeling under skilled and under resourced to optimize the impact of CPT for people with communication difficulties. They report multiple challenges, including a lack of experiential learning opportunities, lack of social support from colleagues and managers and lack of belief about their own capabilities or the benefits for their patients.

This talk focuses on describing practical tools and feasible strategies for implementing CPT, and the role of SLTs and leaders in the implementation. The speaker will also discuss communication skills in early career healthcare students and share different points of view on how to set up participatory action research to develop and evaluate implementation strategies for CPT.

Biography:

Maren van Rijssen was born on December 20th 1989 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She studied Pharmacy for a short time, but then decided to switch and study Speech and Language Therapy. At the same time, she followed the minor program

Linguistics at the University of Groningen. In 2013, she finished both studies and started working as a SLT in various hospitals, where she specialized in aphasia diagnostics and therapy. She started with the Master Clinical Language, Speech and Hearning Sciences at Utrecht University in 2013. After achieving her master degree, she began her PhD at the HU University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht. In her PhD, she developed and evaluated CommuniCare, a CPT intervention for the Dutch and Flemish context. At present, Maren continues her work as a post-doc researcher in CPT

implementation. In addition, she is a lecturer in the bachelor program Pharmaceutical Business Administration of HU and in the master program Clinical Health Sciences of Utrecht University.

                                                               Professor Jamie Azios

Title: "She made an effort to come to me when I was at my worst point": Helping people with aphasia keep their friends

Summary:

Friendship is critical to social inclusion, contributes to physical health, and is often viewed as a common source of joy. Unfortunately, people with aphasia are at high risk for losing friendships. While a few programs have been developed to facilitate new friendships after aphasia, there are no published interventions that aim to help people with aphasia maintain existing friendships. This talk will describe the formation of a team of clinical researchers and a consultative stakeholder group made up of people with aphasia, clinicians, and spouses to address this need. Data from a scoping review illustrating friendship interventions in healthy older adults and individuals with neurogenic communication disorders and a large qualitative study of people with aphasia, their significant others, and their friends will be presented. Together, findings from these studies will be discussed in relation to the development of a two-stage program to target friendship maintenance. The talk will conclude with a collection of example practices that clinicians can implement to help people with aphasia stay connected to friends across the recovery continuum.

Biography:

Jamie H. Azios, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is the Doris B. Hawthorne Endowed Chair in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research interests include qualitative research methodologies, understanding perspectives of people living with communication disabilities, co-constructed conversation in aphasia, and the impact of communicative environments on social participation and inclusion. She has published articles related to client-centeredness, communication access, functional outcomes of aphasia therapy, and friendship and aphasia.

                                                               Programme:

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

We would like to the opportunity to thank our sponsors for their support. Further information on our sponsors can be found below:

The Centre for NeuroRehabilitation at Queen Square: www.ucl.ac.uk/centre-neurorehabilitation/

CueSpeak: cuespeak.com

JR press: www.jr-press.co.uk

Please note that sponsors had no influence on the content of this conference