Keri Danziger is Supervisor of inpatient adult speech and swallowing services at North Campus. She joined NYU Langone Medical Center and the Rusk Team in 2011. She is responsible for supervision of daily clinical and administrative operations for both acute care and inpatient rehabilitation services. She has been a medical speech-language pathologist for the past 18 years with a background in assessment and treatment of communication and swallowing in patients with critical illness and following trauma. Special interests include management of patients with tracheostomy, head and neck cancer, ethical issues in managing communication and feeding/swallowing in end-of-life, and swallowing impairments with medically complex infants. She is a Board Certified Specialist in Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders. Her undergraduate degree is from Miami University of Ohio and her graduate degree is from NYU. She completed a Clinical Fellowship at Stonybrook University Medical Center.
In this interview, she discusses the kinds of patients she treats who have had a tracheostomy, the potential for hospital-acquired tracheostomy-related pressure ulcers to arise, swallowing and communication problems experienced by patients, speech-language pathology's role in treating such problems, available diagnostic tools to identify neuromuscular physiologic component of a swallow disorder, developing individualized approaches to patients who differ from one another, and the use of speaking valves.