Speech-Language Pathologist, ProMedica

My name is Kayla St. Holtz, and I'm a speech language pathologist. So I work in two different settings within ProMedica. I work in the acute care setting in the hospital as well as the outpatient setting seeing across the lifespan. I see from the little kiddos all the way up to adults in the hospital. So I get to see a wide variety of people and get to help in their rehab as well as their diagnosis process and all of that. In the hospital setting, I do a lot of swallowing evals, so making sure people are safe to eat, and then also working with their cognition to make sure that they're safe to go home to take care of themselves, and giving them some compensation strategies to be safe while eating and doing their everyday activities. And then in the outpatient setting, I primarily work with the pediatric population. So that deals more heavily with their language development and their speech production. I think probably the biggest responsibility I have is making sure that people are put on the most appropriate diet and make sure that they're safe for oral intake. So with that, trying to determine that in the safest way possible is going for a video fluoroscopy swallow study, which entails them going down to radiology. They have to eat and drink barium covered food and liquids, and then we take an x-ray. So in real time we see a movie of their swallow, and then we're able to further determine the safety of their swallow and diet that they're able to tolerate. So right now we're trying to grow our pediatric program at my facility. So we've been working on some marketing, reaching out and networking with other agencies in the area, and just trying to build a program that would be able to best service the pediatric population in Lenawee County.