Vocal illness in teachers and strategies for overcoming it

Abstract

Purpose: to characterize the process of vocal alteration in teachers from the county school system and strategies utilized for its elimination. Methods: 109 teachers of a city from the countryside of São Paulo participated, mean age of 37 years, female sex (96.3%), married (69.9%), college professors (84.4%), who mentioned vocal alteration in a questionnaire that addressed the conditions of work, characteristics of vocal alteration and treatments performed. Results: the perception of the problem occurred more than 4 years ago (32.4%), with a “show and disappear” form of initiation (75%) and peaks of improvement and worsening (77.7%). The teachers evaluated the alteration as moderate (53%), after the intensive use of voice (93.6%), stress (61.5%) and allergy (56.9%). The voice is better in the mornings and gets worse over the day (53.2%), and people wonder what the problem is (45%). The most frequent symptoms were hoarseness (72.5%), dry throat (64.22%) and throat clearing (56.88%), considering that 91.7% of the teachers pointed out more than four symptoms, indicating vocal fatigue. The privileged treatment was through medicine (57.4%), followed by speech therapy (48.9%) Which may indicate lack of access to speech therapists in public health and lack of systemic and articulate actions to recover the vocal health of the teachers. Conclusion: the teachers vocal illness was characterized by begin for over four years, with multiple and intermittent symptoms, moderate degree, due to overuse of the voice and with privilege of drug treatment.