Despite the plethora of reports detailing strategies designed to improve communication and care for hospital patients with severe communication disabilities, problems communicating in hospital, and the associated negative health impacts for patients with severe communication disabilities, continue to occur (e.g., Dinsmore, 2012; Hemsley, Werninck, & Worrall, 2013b).
Increasing the capacity of staff to provide care that relieves family caregiving responsibilities only occurs if staff members have increased exposure to and experience in communicating with people with communication disabilities.
Further work is needed to determine how to consistently and accurately document patients' communication abilities so staff and providers can quickly recognize how best to communicate with patients with communication disabilities.
While prosthetic and alternative means of communicating exist, all patients will have persistent communication disabilities.
Consequently, quickly identifying patients with communication disabilities and the methods they use to communicate would be challenging.
It is possible that, as for other Twitter communities, the vast majority of people with severe communication disabilities in Twitter are "invisible" to researchers and to one another.
Implications for Rehabilitation Twitter can be used as an important vehicle for conversation and a forum for people with communication disabilities to exchange information and participate socially in online communities.
As such, people with severe communication disabilities might need information and guidance on strategies for utilizing all communicative functions and purposes of Twitter if they are to become more visible in the online publics [ 1, 6, 12, 18].
Android This app has been designed for people on the autism spectrum or with other communication disabilities.
To review the research literature on the experiences of patients with communication disabilities in hospital according to the Generic Model of patient safety.
Re "The President's Name Trips Up a Would-Be Voice of the News" (front page, May 8): The problems in Amazon Kindle's name pronunciation have plagued people with severe communication disabilities who use electronic communication devices.
