Development of a Measure of Communication Activity for the Acute Hospital Setting: Part 1. Rationale and Preliminary Findings‪.‬

It has been argued that speech-language pathologists working in the acute hospital setting could enhance patient health care and patient satisfaction with health care if they supported patients with communication difficulties and health care staff to communicate in optimal ways during everyday hospital communication activities. In order to do this however, speech-language pathologists need a reliable and valid measure of a patient's ability to communicate in everyday hospital situations. This article is the first article in a two-part series that describes the development of a new measure of communication activity for the acute hospital setting called the Inpatient Functional Communication Interview (IFCI; O'Halloran, Worrall, Toffolo, Code, & Hickson, 2004). This first article investigated whether two measures of communication activity, the Functional Communication Profile (FCP; Sarno, 1969) and the Inpatient Functional Communication Interview-Research Version (IFCI-RV; Toffolo, Code, & McCooey, 1995), were representative of the communication situations that actually occur during staff-patient interactions in the acute hospital setting. Direct observation of staff-patient interactions indicated that neither the items on the FCP nor the IFCI-RV captured the range and type of communication activities that actually occurred. **********