Student participants’ free comments after a short-term session of augmentative and alternative communication for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Abstract

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has been used for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients with severe communication difficulties. We planned a brief educational course for students in multiple healthcare disciplines. In 2018 we held 2 sessions more than 5 months apart. We set out to test a preliminary hypothesis that there would be a difference between novice students and an experienced group of students who had already attended the session once, especially in terms of their ease in managing the AAC. We compared data from the second training session between 6 students (experienced group) who had attended the same session twice in March and August, and 6 new students (novice group) who had never experienced AAC before August. We measured the number of letters obtained by each AAC method and the participants' perceived burden before/after using AAC evaluated by a visual analog scale (VAS). We also asked the participants to write comments after using AAC. We compared the number of letters and the subjective burden between the two groups. Free-text comments were processed by text-mining software (KH Coder®). The burden of the Flick type of communication board was lower for the experienced group (p=0.034). Comparison of Difficulty/Ease of the two groups with KH Coder ® suggested less difficulty in the experienced group (p=0.002). Text-mining of the free comments suggested some difference on Difficulty/Ease between the 2 groups with and without the experience of the educational course.