UW-Eau Claire expands speech therapy and audiology services to help after HSHS and Prevea closures

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (WEAU) - UW-Eau Claire has expanded one of it’s services to help aid the community after the closures of HSHS and Prevea Clinics.

The speech therapy and audiology services and clinic at UW-Eau Claire has been around since the mid 70s.

“Our services are offered by our undergraduate and graduate students who are here in the program, they’re all supervised by licensed speech pathologists, which is all of the faculty and staff that work here,” said Dr. Abby Hemmerich, Chair of the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at UW-EC. “Our clinic serves individuals from birth until geriatric age. Individuals who have communication challenges. So it could be kids who have difficulty with some of their sounds, kids with autism that have some communication challenges, can be adults who have had a stroke or a brain injury and need some support with gaining communication.”

They usually take about 100 people to provide services to in the community but so far since expanding in March they have gained around 20 new patients.

“As soon as we heard about what was happening in our community and some of the closures that were happening, we immediately looked at what we were already doing and looked for spaces where we could open up some slots for individuals.”

And the services are all free.

“We are a teaching institution and this is part of what we need to teach our students to be professionals working in the community. We’re training future speech, language pathologists. And part of that process is they have to gain 400 clinical clock hours as graduate students. That’s a lot of time spent with patients. So that’s why we have a clinic on campus. Our dean and our University have been really supportive in making sure we have the funding to do that.”

“A big mission of UW-Eau Claire is really to engage with the community and be a a positive contributor to the community. So our department really has embraced that. There’s needs out there and one of our primary missions here is to fill those needs.”

Dr. Hemmerich says if you are in need of the services they provide to reach out to the communications sciences and disorders department.

More information can be found here.