Family therapy can help kids with cleft lip

CHENNAI: Family therapy is the only way to help a child with a cleft lip, speak better, said Dr M N Nagaraja, Director, Dr SR Chandrasekhar Institute of Speech and Hearing from Bengaluru. He said the old approach of repetitive drills of speaking were of no use. One has to use family therapy to involve every one in the family of such a child to make it speak better. He also released a listening training CD on the subject. He spoke while inaugurating a week-long training programme for speech therapists at The Speech, Language and Hearing department of Sri Ramachandra University. Participants from Kota, Meerut, Varanasi, Belgaum, Hyderabad and Chennai are all set to undergo intensive training to understand the various communication disorders of cleft lip and cleft palate patients who undergo corrective surgeries, so that successful corrective speech therapy can be provided in the quickest possible time.Roopa Nagarajan, Project Director, SRUSTI (Sri Ramachandra University – Smile Train Speech Training Initiative) and Chairperson, Speech Language and Hearing Department, SRU said the training programme was intended to improve the skills of speech pathologists so that they could start specialised centres in their hospitals/institutes.