welcome to release

Research

Through the generosity of the Iris O'Brien Foundation and another anonymous donator in 2008, Release began quantitative research with The George Washington University. The research included 69 children aged birth - 5 years, with a communication disability such as Down syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder and cerebral palsy.

Families agreed to participate in the following:

1. Agree not to partake in any other speech and language therapy session
2. Provide Release with all previous assessments and reports on their child
3. Fill in an At-Home-Assessment in advance of the Release Assessment
4. Parents participate in the "Parent Stress Index" test, pre and post therapy
5. Each child to be assessed by a Release speech and language therapist, pre and post therapy using Irish and US accepted standardised tests.
6. Attend 20 weeks of hourly group speech and language therapy
7. Try to complete ½ hour of homework per day.

The research was submitted to the American Speech Language and Hearing Association's Call for Papers for the 2009 Convention and to Release's acclaim the research was accepted http://www.asha.org. This is the largest and most prestigious of all conventions in the field of speech and language therapy, attended by over 12,000 speech and language therapists and audiologists from around the world. Competition and peer review is extremely intense. The Release submittal is for the "poster session", allowing hundreds of speech and language therapists to review and learn from our programme, thereby launching Release as an emerging best practice-Ireland's first in early intervention speech and language therapy.

In only 20 weeks of speech and language therapy Release students saw results equal to that of The George Washington University's 1:1 system, and vastly surpassed the results from year on year HSE speech assessments.

Description	Release (parent inclusion)	GWU (no parent inclusion)	HSE (multiple methods)
Therapist to child ratio for this research	1:69	1:9	Results are not available
Improved at least one severity level	74%	78%	14%
Stress Levels reduction High Moderate Low	Pre - Post 64% - 28% 32% - 43% 4% - 29%	N/A	N/A

With Release:

1. 74% of children improved a severity level, e.g. for a child who was originally assessed as having moderate communication difficulties, after six months of (Release) speech and language therapy their communication skills were found to have improved so that they moved into the mild range (i.e. their communication skills were found to have improved significantly at reassessment)
2. 97% of children increased their communication levels more than the 20 weeks they participated (on average 11 ½ months)
3. Almost every family experienced a significant decrease in stress levels

To read the full Call for Papers click here.

To find out how the Release programme works click here.

Release is currently raising funds for the next stage of research which will be used to "bullet proof" the results, thereby opening up the programme to be used by State healthcare providers, insurance companies etc. This research will enable up to 1.8 million children aged 0 - 3 in the US, Ireland, Canada and the UK alone. Please click here to donate towards this research fund.