FEES Referral

Are you a Speech Pathologist wanting to provide your clients with the best evidence-based practice? Does your client need an instrumental assessment to guide your intervention or to help your client make decisions about their eating and drinking?

Would you like your client to have an instrumental assessment in their usual residence, eating their own foods and using their own utensils and crockery?

WE CAN HELP!!

Why should I get a FEES for my client?

Find out whether that cough is actually a sign of aspiration

It might be just penetration and effectively cleared. Or it might be reflux. Thickening fluids might not be necessary

Find out what strategies stop aspiration or improve clearance of residue

It might be really easy for your client to compensate for their difficulties without changing their diet. Better for them, greater satisfaction in you as a therapist

Provide more objective information for informed decision-making

So, they’re aspirating. Does it happen all the time? Or just sometimes? On all mouthfuls or just when consecutive sipping? Can their cough effectively clear it? Find out the answers so your client can make an INFORMED decision about how they want to manage their swallowing difficulties

Benefits to you

Understand your clients dysphagia

So you can give them evidence-based intervention. You can’t do this without instrumental assessment

Visualise what you predict on your clinical assessment in 3-D real time

This helps you understand your clinical reasoning and makes you better at hypothesising the cause of your clients swallowing difficulties. In turn, a better dysphagia clinician.

Professional development

Watching the FEES, discussing and problem-solving during the assessment with Dijana is a great way to learn more and grow as a dysphagia clinician. You will learn so much about FEES, interpretation and recommendations from collaborating during FEES. You deserve to have the tools you need to do your job

Frequently Asked Questions:

What’s involved in organising and performing a FEES for my client?

FEES is done on a consultative basis. Therefore, the treating Speech Pathologist remains the treating Speech Pathologist. The FEES is done to inform the treating Speech Pathologist’s practice.

The treating Speech Pathologist will discuss FEES with the client before referral. Referral is then done on the website with consent from the client (see below). Once the referral is received, Sydney Swallowing Diagnostics will contact the client/support person to discuss. The GP is also contacted to check for risk factors.

A plan for the assessment is then made with the treating Speech Pathologist, who assists on the day.

The recording of the assessment is then analysed and a report is written. The video is made available to the client and the treating clinician for ongoing education and feedback to the client.

The client can still be referred if there is no treating Speech Pathologist.

Have another question? Please contact us at dijana@sydneyswallowingdiagnostics.com.au if you have another question.