Treatment
Surgical Intervention
​The purpose of Surgical Intervention is to, primarily, anatomically close the defect, which will increase the individuals capacity for speech, reduce future dentition and alveolar deformity and improve the ease of feeding for the child. Below is a non-exhausted list of surgical techniques used for these purposes.
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von Langenbeck's bipedicle flap technique
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Veau-Wardill-Kilner Pushback technique
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Furlow Double opposing Z-Plasty
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Two-stage palatal repair
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Alveolar extension palatoplasty (AEP)
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Primary pharyngeal flap
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Intravelar veloplasty
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Vomer flap
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Buccal myomucosal flap
(Agrawal, 2009).
Speech Intervention
"Obligatory" errors are not targeted in speech therapy interventions. These errors are results of physical structure that will be treated through surgical means and are not a result of articulation or phonatory errors.
Major goals of speech intervention is for "normal" speech, or speech that is reflective of age and the average development of a child's peer group. Simple intelligibility is not the only goal.
Treatment for speech intervention related to cleft palate is similar to the treatment for other speech sound disorders.
Therapy is often an elastic treatment in the sense that many different evidence based approaches are available and your SLP may observe that the initial approach is not being effective and will change course with another approach.
.(Kotlarek & Krueger, 2023).