Hope in the Aphasia Clinical Process

Episode 143 Hope in Aphasia Clinical Process with Jaqueline Hinckley

In this episode you will learn about: the science of hope and theories of hope, scales that can be used to measure hope, realistic hope and false hope and the importance of having conversations that support realistic hope, and ideas to embed hope theories, hope measurement and conversations about hope into clinical aphasiology.

Janet Patterson: Welcome to this edition of Aphasia Access Podversations, a series of conversations about community aphasia programs that follow the LPAA model. My name is Janet Patterson, and I am a Research Speech-Language Pathologist at the VA Northern California Health Care System in Martinez, California, and am a member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group, a community dedicated to supporting better aphasia care. Today, I have the honor of speaking with my longtime friend and colleague, Jackie Hinkley. Jackie is Professor in Speech-Language Pathology and Program Director at Nova Southeastern University. She's currently serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Aphasia Association and is also serving on the Certification Board of the Academy of Neurologic Communication Disorders and Sciences. She is Editor for Language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and has several other editorial roles. She is the program lead for Project Bridge and is currently co-project lead on another project funded by PCORI, which is the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, in which people with aphasia, clinicians, and researchers are co-developing a core impact set for aphasia through the NAA.

The focus of our conversation today is hope and aphasia. As we talk about hope, Jackie and I think of our friend and colleague Sandy Glista, who was an integral part of Aphasia Access, and who exemplified hope in her work and interactions with people with aphasia, students, care partners, and clinicians. Recently, Jackie and I co-wrote a paper examining the science and practice of hope, which forms the basis of our conversation today. Welcome, Jackie, and thank you so much for joining me to talk about our exploration into hope and how we can embed hope into the clinical practice of aphasiology.

Jackie Hinckley: Thank you, Janet. I'm so happy and honored to be talking about hope with you. We've worked together for so long, and hope is such an integral part of what we do, whether we think about it and acknowledge it explicitly or not. So, I'm excited about this topic.

Janet: Let's begin our conversation then with a basic question: What is hope? So, Jackie, a while ago, when we began talking about hope and aphasia, we thought about hope as being something everyone knows about. In speech-language pathology, clinicians and researchers talk about hope as important to a person's aphasia journey. Yet few have looked beneath the surface to understand what hope really means, how it supports rehabilitation outcomes, and examine the science behind hope. We embrace that topic, beginning by looking at hope from a theoretical perspective. The first, and most influential theory we found, is hope theory. Will you describe that theory, Jackie, and give us a glimpse at how it has influenced the science of hope.

Jackie: Yes, while investigating the science of hope, we found that hope theory, which was developed by Snyder and colleagues, was by far the most influential in terms of the amount of literature and references. And in addition, hope theory has been the foundation for tools to measure hope, and has also been the inspiration for recommendations on how we can think about hope in the context of rehabilitation. It really boils down to three main components. The first component in hope theory is the target or goal of hope. So, it's the thing that we want to have happen. The second component of hope theory is termed the pathway. This is the action or a set of actions, some route we have to take to get to that