Språkscreening vid 2,5 års ålder med Westerlunds 3-årsmetod

Sammanfattning: To identify children at risk of developing a language disability, the majority of Swedish Child Health Centers (CHCs) have since the early 90’s conducted language screening with 3-year olds using Westerlund’s method or with 2,5-year olds using Miniscalco’s method. The National Board of Health and Welfare has published a new national child healthcare program (Socialstyrelsen, 2014b) in which the language screening in Uppsala municipality needs to resituate to when the child is 2,5 years old. This is due to the fact that a team evaluation is going to be performed when the child is 3 years old. The study aimed to evaluate the process and screened 70 children in 4 CHCs with a revised version of Westerlund’s method. That method was chosen because of the fact that nurses at CHC’s in Uppsala already use it on 3-year olds. Out of the 70 children, 16 failed and were followed up at 3 years of age. By then 9/16 failed again. This gives the screening 44% false positive results, which means that 44% of the children that screened positive are not actually at risk of developing a language disability. The same number for Westerlund’s original method is 4,5% (2/44) and Miniscalco’s is 48% (12/25). The later is interesting in comparison with this study due to the fact that they involve children of the same age. When conducting a clinical evaluation for Westerlund’s revised method involving 2,5-year olds, important factors to look further at are true/false positives and outcome per screening section. If the patterns found in this study are somewhat alike the patterns shown when screening a larger study population, the referential criteria might need a re-evaluation. The nurses involved in this study believe the screening works well with younger children, but they wish for more contact with a speech language pathologist to discuss difficult cases. Keywords: language screening, child healthcare program, CHC, language disability, Westerlund’s method