Progressing Toward Life Goals

Abstract

As the profession of speech-language pathology continues to grow, it proliferates clinical approaches. Recent additions have been to focus on a client's life participation, to involve clients in clinical decision making, and to develop more culturally sensitive practices. In this article, we argue that these additions should not be seen as therapeutic alternatives or in competition with impairment-oriented approaches. Rather, we see the additions as comprising different strands of a complex therapeutic process. The evaluation question is not what approach to use to reduce our clients' impairment, but rather which approaches will best lead clients toward attaining their life goals. We propose that the clients' progression toward life goals be the standard used to evaluate the whole course of therapy. We illustrate this holistic, life goals approach to evaluation through clinical case examples.