Wai Lam has close to 20 years of experience in adult speech, language and swallowing therapy. He is the inventor of the Chin Tuck Against Resistance (CTAR), a swallowing therapy exercise that is currently practiced worldwide. He has trained hundreds of speech therapists both locally and regionally. He is often consulted by speech therapists and other healthcare professionals for complex cases involving both speech and swallowing difficulties in Singapore and overseas.

He began his career in Singapore General Hospital (SGH) in year 2001. He was in charge of the dysphagia clinic, setting up of sEMG clinic, and Prosthetic Speech and Swallowing Clinic (PSSR) in collaboration with the National Dental Centre (NDC). In year 2006, he moved on to set up Speech Therapy Works to provide home therapy services and locum services to the local hospitals and nursing homes. He was also a part-time lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Masters in Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) programme from 2008-2018.

Wai Lam has developed training programmes and has been conducting trainings and workshops on dysarthria and dysphagia in Singapore and overseas. He continues to supervise and provide support to the speech therapists in local hospitals and from abroad. He has been actively supporting the development of dysphagia management in Malaysia. In 2019, he was invited as a co-trainer at the distinguished Langmore Foundation FEES Course & Post Laryngectomy Rehabilitation Course at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India.

Wai Lam’s research papers has been presented at local and international conferences and published in international journals. His research on CTAR exercise has won the first price poster presentation at the Dysphagia Research Society at Seattle, USA in 2013. Wai Lam’s CTAR research papers have been widely cited in international journal papers and text books (ResearchGate March 2020: ~ 80 citations). Wai Lam is also a reviewer of the Dysphagia Journal.

Wai Lam has developed various therapy protocol & therapy tools. His dysphagia therapy protocols for brainstem stroke, late effect from radiotherapy for nasopharyngeal cancer or head & neck cancer, and swallowing difficulties due to anterior cervical osteophytes have helped many patients to improve their swallowing functions. In 2018, he has successfully developed a smart swallowing device prototype in collaboration with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Research and development are ongoing.

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