Catherine Crowley and Miriam Baigorri of Teachers College Columbia University developed the “Building Capacity: The Cleft Palate Speech Training Project” for local professionals to begin to acquire the academic and clinical skills needed to provide quality services to children with cleft lip and palate. This project offers five days of intensive training with academic lectures in the mornings and clinical application with patients with cleft lip and palate in the afternoons.
This program focuses on building the capacity of local professionals, preferably those with degrees in the country’s equivalent of speech-language pathology (SLP), so they acquire the knowledge and skills to work with cleft palate children and their families once they complete the program. To receive a certificate of completion, participants must demonstrate acquisition of the materials and skills through daily tests and a comprehensive academic and clinical exam. Once the program finishes, ongoing consultative support is offered via skype.
This video shows the first program administration, which was done at the Universidad de Istmo in Guatemala City, Guatemala in March 2012. They have created videos in Spanish with English subtitles for families of children with cleft lip and palate when no speech-language provider is available. http://youtu.be/4Op7-e5p834
Cate Crowley, J.D., Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a distinguished senior lecturer in the program of speech-language pathology at Teachers College Columbia University in New York, New York. Miriam Baigorri, M.S., CCC-SLP, is a clinical supervisor there and is also the bilingual pediatric SLP at Bellevue Hospital in New York. They were invited by Operation Smile to offer a five-day training program for learning disabilities specialists at the University of Istmo in Guatemala City, Guatemala in March 2012.
Feedback is encouraged and can be sent to Crowley@tc.columbia.edu. Funding and support comes from The Wyncote Foundation, Central Coast Children’s Foundation, Teachers College Columbia University, and Rotary International.
