About Us
A Plus Speech Therapy is a private speech therapy practice providing both in office a online speech teletherapy services in English and Español.
We believes in a family-centered approach to speech and language therapy. We are committed to providing individualized treatment plans that address the needs of the family and client. We use evidence-based practice shown to reach effective outcomes for a variety of language, speech, feeding and swallowing disorders.
We believe that every therapy session is an opportunity to empower the families we work with through a collaborative approach. The family unit is a strong component in client motivation and follow-through with recommendations. We achieve a team-approach through demonstration of intervention strategies and coaching during each therapy session.
Our goal is not only to provide therapy for the client but also to provide caregivers and families with the tools needed in order to help their loved ones. By learning to recognize opportunities to naturally teach your child or help your loved one throughout the day it will be easy and fun to practice speech and language skills whether you are at home or on the go.
We offer therapy services in our office, in your home, at your child’s school or daycare and via teletherapy. Teletherapy involves the use of live video to provide therapy. We can also provide a combination of live-video and in-home services.
Because of our family-centered approach and availability of teletherapy, we stand out from the rest. Our collaborative approach allows us to achieve functional outcomes that lead to improved quality of life, increased self-esteem, improved behavior and increased social and academic success.
Meet The Founder
Maria Bernabe, MS, CCC-SLP is a bilingual, ASHA certified, Speech-Language Pathologist in Collier and Lee Counties. She helps children and adolescents with a variety of speech and language disorders or delays. She also provides feeding and swallowing intervention. Maria specializes in the pediatric population and teletherapy services. She has worked in hospitals, schools, private practice and outpatient facilities.
Maria is the co-founder of Telehealth Specialists, an educational site dedicated to providing information to Speech and Language Pathologists seeking to learn about the field of telehealth.
A Plus Speech Therapy is located at Coconut Point Mall in Estero, Florida. In office visits are by appointment only.
Specialty Training and Certifications
PROMPT Trained
PROMPT stands for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets. It is a technique used to guide a client to produce targeted sounds by providing tactile cues for sounds in words, phrases and sentences. This technique is beneficial for many clients who struggle with speech intelligibility.
Myofascial Release Trained
Myofascial release is a manual technique used to help improve the movement, agility and strength of the swallowing muscles at all stages of the swallow. This technique is beneficial but not limited to clients who have had a stroke or oropharyngeal cancer leading to swallowing difficulty.
VitalStim NMES Certified
NMES stands for Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation. It is a technique used to treat clients that have swallowing difficulty. This technique combines the use of neuromuscular electrical stimulation and traditional dysphagia therapy to improve the swallowing mechanism.
LSVT LOUD Certified
LSVT stands for Lee Silverman Voice Treatment. It is a therapy technique used to improve vocal loudness and speech intelligibility with patients who have Parkinson’s Disease. Therapy helps individuals begin to use a louder voice so that they can be understood more easily.