Communicative Participation in Goal-Setting Meetings for Patients with Aphasia after Stroke. A Study Using Patients' and Healthcare Professionals' Self-Ratings

Purpose: Communicative participation poses a challenge in meetings between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and people with aphasia (PwA). How communication is affected by aphasia in group meetings, where several healthcare professionals participate together with the patient, is largely unexplored. The aim of this study was to investigate self-rated communicative participation during goal-setting meetings among PwA compared to patients without aphasia and to investigate whether communicative participation among PwA was associated with self-rated knowledge about aphasia among HCPs. A further aim was to investigate if there was a difference in the use of communication strategies among HCPs in the respective situations. Methods: Nine PwA and nine control patients without aphasia rated their experience of communication during a goal-setting meeting. Thirty-eight HCPs rated their knowledge about aphasia and communication, and their use of communication strategies during goal-setting meetings. Results: The PwA reported being listened to by the HCPs as well as being able to comprehend the meeting. PwA with more severe language impairment did not report a lower level of communicative participation compared to PwA with milder impairment. Half of the patients from both groups indicated some difficulty asking questions during the meeting. Patients' ratings of communication were not correlated to HCPs' knowledge of communication strategies. There was a significant difference in self-rated use of communication strategies among HCPs for the two conditions, although the individual variation was large. Conclusion: Results from both PwA and controls imply that patients may need more support to be able to ask questions in meetings with HCPs. Although self-ratings increase the ecological validity of the study of participation, further studies could benefit from using video observations in combination with self-reported experience, since awareness might influence results.