Tanner Perschau, 2nd-year Speech-language Pathology graduate student and 2025-26 NC Schweitzer Fellow, pens op-ed about the communication barriers between people with aphasia and healthcare professionals.
An op-ed by Tanner Perschau, 2nd-year Speech-language Pathology graduate student and 2025-26 NC Schweitzer Fellow, was recently published. In this article, Perchau explains how people with aphasia—who make up a third of stroke survivors—face serious communication barriers in healthcare that jeopardize their psychosocial and physical well‑being. She shares more on how communicative access within healthcare is diminished for adults with aphasia.
People with aphasia make up at least one-third of the estimated 795,000 stroke survivors in America each year, although it is underdiagnosed in acute settings. Aphasia is an acquired language impairment that can affect one’s ability to express and understand spoken or written language. It is not a loss of intellect. People with aphasia are not only at higher risk of poorer psychosocial and health outcomes but are also vulnerable in healthcare as a whole. They have a higher risk of depression, longer lengths of stay in hospitals, and worse rehabilitation outcomes than stroke survivors without aphasia. They face significant challenges in typical encounters with health care professionals and are at greater risk of experiencing preventable adverse events within our healthcare system.
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