Speech Therapy in Defence Colony

Speech and language therapy in Defence Colony covers a wider span than any other service we run: a toddler with no words, a child who stammers, and an adult relearning speech or swallowing after a stroke are all speech and language work. The short answer is our Malviya Nagar centre, because we do not have a centre in Defence Colony. This page sets out what we treat, how often, and the part that actually decides whether it works.

Which eMbrace centre Defence Colony families use

Our closest centre to Defence Colony is in Malviya Nagar, at FC-29, Plot No. 5, Geetanjali, beside Malviya Nagar Metro Station Gate No. 1. We have no centre in Defence Colony, and it is a drive of some length, not a hop.

From Defence Colony, Jangpura and Lajpat Nagar the road route runs via Ring Road and Press Enclave Marg. On the metro it is a Violet Line to Yellow Line change at Central Secretariat or Hauz Khas depending on where you start, so most families in this catchment drive.

For families where the travel is the obstacle rather than the appointment, we run sessions online, and a good deal of child psychology work, particularly parent-facing sessions, does not lose anything in that format.

Sessions are weekly, and here is the part providers underplay: the session matters less than the ten minutes a day at home. This is skill practice, built by repetition in ordinary settings rather than in a clinic room once a week. If ten minutes daily is not realistic right now, say so and we will build a smaller programme that is.

For parking, the nearest drop-off point and the quickest route at your particular time of day, ask on the intake call. Traffic and parking around every one of these centres change enough through the day that current directions from someone who works there beat anything we could fix on a web page.

What we treat

The two ends of the range look nothing alike. For children: late talking, unclear speech, language that is not developing, stammering, feeding and oral motor difficulty, cleft lip and palate, cochlear implant support, verbal dyspraxia, and the social use of language in autism. For adults, mostly after neurological illness: aphasia, dysarthria, voice and difficulty swallowing safely.

• A child with fewer than around fifty words at two, or not putting words together by two and a half
• Speech that people outside the family cannot understand by around four
• Stammering that has lasted more than six months, or that the child has become aware of
• Coughing or distress when eating or drinking, at any age, which should be looked at promptly
• Adults with speech, voice or swallowing difficulty after a stroke or with a progressive condition

Each of these has its own page on our speech and language hub.

What the first appointment involves

An assessment first, because difficulties that look identical can have quite different causes. We take a history, analyse speech and language directly, and check the mechanics where feeding or oral motor control are involved. Hearing is always considered, being the commonest missed explanation for a language delay.

You leave with a baseline, targets in plain terms, and specific things to do at home. With young children the parent session matters as much as the child session, since you run the practice.

What we see most of here

From Defence Colony and Jangpura we see a mix of early years work and adult neurological rehabilitation, the latter often following discharge from one of the hospitals nearby.

Swallowing assessment is a recurring reason adults are referred here, and it is the part of the caseload where delay carries the most risk.

Who you would see at our Malviya Nagar centre

Dr Supriya Malik, Founder and CEO, and Head of the Child Development Centre at Rainbow

PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Birmingham, where she was also a postdoctoral researcher, and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society in the UK. She designed the assessment and therapy pathways every eMbrace centre runs.

At our Malviya Nagar centre, the clinicians who take this work are:

Upasna, Speech Language Pathologist

Upasna holds a Master and a Bachelor in Speech Language Pathology from the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Speech and Hearing Disability in Kolkata. Her paediatric work covers spoken language disorders, misarticulation, late language emergence, developmental verbal dyspraxia, developmental stuttering and cluttering, cleft lip and palate, cochlear implant support, cerebral palsy and pragmatic language difficulty in autism.

Which of them you see is decided on the intake call rather than by whoever has the next free slot, and you are told who it will be before you book. Fuller biographies are on our about page.

Schools and services we already work with

Referrals around Defence Colony reach this service through several routes, and the institutional ones are worth knowing about.

Our Malviya Nagar centre runs inside Rainbow Children's Hospital, New Delhi, which is why occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy, behaviour therapy and special education sit in the same building as assessment.

Through The Medical Travel Company we provide autism and ADHD assessment and therapy for families in the UK, across Africa and elsewhere in India, on hybrid, in-person and online programmes.

Fees and how long it takes

Fees are quoted upfront on your intake call and depend on the clinician and the frequency. Courses are typically blocks of eight to twelve weekly sessions followed by a review, rather than an open-ended commitment.

How long depends on what is being treated. An articulation difficulty often resolves in a block or two. Language disorder, verbal dyspraxia and post-stroke aphasia are longer, and we say which you are looking at rather than letting you assume the shorter one.

Frequently asked questions