Inpatient Functional Communication Interview

The Inpatient Functional Communication Interview: Screening, Assessment, and Intervention (IFCI: SAI) is a set of four resources for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and other healthcare professionals working in acute and rehabilitation hospitals. They can be used separately or together to enhance patient-provider communication in hospitals. The IFCI: SAI has been developed so healthcare professionals can identify and support patients who have difficulty communicating, with a focus on patients with communication disability. The following resources are included:


Screening Questionnaire. Designed to identify patients who have difficulty communicating about their healthcare and will need support to communicate with healthcare providers in hospital.
Inpatient Functional Communication Interview (IFCI). A semi-structured interview that the SLP conducts at the patient’s bedside. During the interview, the SLP investigates how well the patient can communicate in everyday healthcare communication activities. If the SLP and patient have difficulty communicating, the clinician investigates if any communication supports or strategies enable successful communication.
Impairment Rating Scales. These assist the SLP to rate their initial clinical impressions of the patient’s speech intelligibility, spoken language, and cognitive-communicative function. Each rating scale provides descriptions of speech, language, and cognitive-communicative function on a five-point scale ranging from no impairment to complete impairment.
Environmental Questionnaires (EQs). The set of EQs assist SLPs and other healthcare professionals to screen the communicative environment for factors influencing patient-provider communication in their setting. Once the factors that influence patient-provider communication have been identified, SLPs and other healthcare professionals may be better informed and more able to systematically address these factors to develop communicatively accessible hospital services.