Hur väl kan 3-årsscreeningen identifiera språkliga svårigheter vid 2,5 års ålder?

Sammanfattning: Since the 1990s the Swedish National Board and Health and Welfare has had the goal of providing a national screening for developmental language and communication disorders among young children in Sweden. Prior to a revision of the child healthcare programme in Sweden in the year 2014 the ages of language screening were either 2;6 years (years;months) or 3;0 years. Today, two different versions of scientifically evaluated screenings of the national screening for developmental language and communication disorders are used, Westerlund’s method designed for screening children at the age of 3;0 and Miniscalco’s method designed for children at the age of 2;6 years. As a consequence of the revision of the child healthcare programme, several counties decided to only screen for language and communicative disorders at 2;6 years of age, amongst them Uppsala County which prior had screened at 3;0 years. This study aims to be a part of a needed new validation to correctly identify children with developmental language and communication disorders at this younger age. 17 children were randomly recruited from the national population register in central Uppsala, and a further 37 children were recruited from the referrals to a speech and language pathologist. The result of the study shows that 5 out of 54 children, 9 %, examined at the age of 2;6 years were misjudged when comparing the screening to a speech and language pathologist examination. The results indicate that it is possible to use Westerlund’s method on younger children. The results may also provide valuable insight as to how the designs of large validation studies can be improved. The study also aimed to compare if some part of Westerlund’s method was less likely to conform to a more thorough examination by a speech and language pathologist. However the methods by which Swedish speech and language pathologists evaluate developmental speech and communication disorders differ so severely from the screening that only half of the reviewed cases could be compared. Therefore, it was deemed that the screening and the speech and language pathologist evaluation were too different for a fair comparison. However, the study can be used to highlight the difference in how pediatric nurses and speech and language pathologists evaluate the childrens’linguistic skills.