The major restriction in gathering information is time and clinic appointments may only last twenty minutes. Parent friendly assessments are sent out with the clinic appointment. Where there is a speech pathologist the assessment is completed by the speech pathologist. The results are checked in the clinic and transferred on to a clinic recording form. These are then transferred to a data base at another time.
Computer technology proceeds at a rapid rate.
We started loading the information on to Paradox, moved to Excel and are now developing a specific database on Access, a relational database. Many of the software packages are now compatible and once the data has been set up can be easily imported into other packages. Storing information on a spreadsheet such as Excel is fairly simple, however developing the structure for a relational data base is much more complex and requires clear aims for outcomes from the beginning. The information below relates to data on 85 clients aged between three and eighteen years of age at the initial clinic assessment . Selected fields of data are presented to demonstrate the type of information collected .