The Primary Care Directorate of the Lanzarote Health Area, attached to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, reinforces the Speech Therapy service with the incorporation, during this month of May, of two new professionals who have begun to attend consultations at the health centers of San Bartolomé and Valterra. This is one of the actions framed in the Comprehensive Strategy of Primary and Community Care, +AP.
The speech therapy rehabilitation service of Primary Care celebrates two years since its launch in May 2021 and since then it has been adding specialized professionals to exclusively attend to Pediatric patients and perform a comprehensive approach to the most frequent language and swallowing disorders of the child population.
Throughout last year, the Speech Therapy consultations in the health centers of Titerroy and Puerto del Carmen attended a total of 2,737 consultations, of which 167 correspond to first consultations and 2,670 were subsequent. In the first months of this year, 1,210 consultations have already been carried out, of which 114 are first and 1,096 correspond to subsequent ones.
New consultations in San Bartolomé and Valterra
The new Speech Therapy consultations are located in the San Bartolomé Health Center, which covers the population of Tinajo, Haría and Teguise, and in the Valterra Health Center,
which also serves patients from Playa Honda. Both consultations are added to the existing ones in the health centers of Titerroy and Puerto del Carmen, in such a way that care is guaranteed to all the Basic Health Zones of the island.
Of the more than 3,000 consultations carried out in this time, according to the professionals of the service, a high percentage of them are related to dyslalia, a language disorder that manifests itself with a difficulty in articulating words and dysphonia or the loss of voice timbre.
The speech therapists of Primary Care develop an important work in the prevention and diagnosis of other difficulties in communication and language, as well as disorders in the intake and swallowing of food in patients with a wide age range, between three and fourteen years. They are also responsible for rehabilitation to intervene in these problems and determine the sessions that are considered necessary.
The new incorporations to the Speech Therapy service are added to other Primary Care actions in the Lanzarote Health Area such as the incorporation of Psychology and Physiotherapist professionals to the portfolio of services provided by health centers to the population of the island, also included in the +AP Strategy.
These new services favor and speed up the speech therapy rehabilitation of the population in pediatric age in the first level of care and allow to reach the target population in a closer and more effective way.