Speech, hearing center attracts clients from wide geographic area

The Center for Speech and Hearing at Southeast Missouri State University is a hub for adults and children in need of affordable and sometimes difficult-to-find services, which is why it plans to expand in the future.

Usually the center has between 50 and 60 clients a semester, plus an additional 25 or 30 for evaluations.

"We have quite a demand for our services," said Dr. Martha Cook, director of the clinic since 2008.

Cook is one of only two people certified in Missouri to administer a specific treatment for stuttering, not to mention being one of the few in the United States.

"Some clients come from west Tennessee, Arkansas, western Illinois and western Kentucky for that service," Cook said.

The center also offers a short-term voice treatment for people with Parkinson's disease that's not offered much elsewhere in the area at such a low cost, she added.

Evaluations at the clinic are conducted for children as young as 2 and adults as old as 90, ranging from language or speech assessments to assessments of infant-toddler development.

Interventions include voice therapy, fluency for stuttering or related disorders and nonmedical intervention for difficulty swallowing. People recovering from strokes or head injuries also may access speech or language therapies to regain lost abilities.

Although the center offers a wide variety of services, some of them, such as the special service for swallowing, are unique in the area. The center also is one of the few in the region to provide auditory processing disorder evaluation and services for children, Cook said.

In addition, the clinic provides services for people learning English as a second language who want to improve their language skills.

"A semester of therapy here, which is 16 weeks, twice a week, which would be 32 sessions, would be equal to probably what [a] hospital would charge for one session of evaluation. It's very low-cost," Cook said.

While graduate students are the ones actually helping clients, all services are provided under the supervision of nationally certified and state licensed speech-language pathologists or audiologists.

Nine faculty members supervise in the clinic, and 35 to 40 students provide services per semester, with about 20 during the summer.

The clinic is not associated with a medical center, and its goal is to treat people as normally as possible. That is why people who require its services are referred to as "clients" and not "patients."

"Using the word 'patient' brings up the idea that a person is ill, and many of our clients are not -- they are quite healthy, they just have communication difficulties," Cook said. "So we try to normalize them by referring to them as clients or customers."

For many, the center is their primary means of addressing their difficulties.

"For some clients, we are the only resource they have," she said. "It's just the state of health care right now and the conditions of our economy, and this is one place they can get the services they might not otherwise get."