A SERVICE to aid young stammer suffers in the region is being held up nationally as the best way to deal with the problem.

The NHS North Yorkshire and York’s NHS Trust's community pre-school dysfluency service has been labelled as outstanding.

The British Stammering Association (BSA) called for improvements to the service and now praises the work that is provided under the trust’s mental health services unit.

The service features innovative speech and language therapists and it covers patients in the Ryedale, Scarborough and Whitby areas.

The NHS trust’s has worked with the BSA under the Every Child’s Chance at Fluency campaign.

This aims to improve the standard of stammering services nationally to provide youngsters with an equal chance of effective therapy.

The trust claims that five per cent of pre-school children will have problems with around 25 per cent of them continuing to stammer in adulthood.

Alison Shepherdson, a specialist speech and language therapist for the trust, said: "Early intervention for children with stammering problems is very important as therapy is more likely to be effective at an early age.

"The changes we have made mean that children under five years old with stammering problems will now have better and quicker access to appropriate therapy services."

The team in North Yorkshire work with children under five years and they host informal drop-in sessions.

Therapists then work with the children and their parents to help them to achieve more fluent speech so that they can remove the stammering.

The BSA was particularly impressed with the use of informal drop-in sessions to assess patients and its use of posters and leaflets.

Margaret Evesham, who led the project on behalf of the BSA, said: "We recommended that the team should make a lot of changes to their service when we first examined them and I’m delighted to say that they’ve surpassed our expectations.

"They’ve worked very hard and they are now in the top 10 per cent of stammering services in the country.

"We’ll be using them as an example of best practice for other services across the country."

For more information on the drop-in sessions, or the trusts work, call its speech and language therapy service on 01723-508202.