About me

• Specialist Speech and Language Therapist at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
• Studied: BSc (Hons) Speech Pathology and Therapy, 2019

About my career

My first job after graduating was a band five speech and language therapist in the adult acute and stroke. I knew for a long time before completing the course that I wanted to be a speech and language therapist and so I gained voluntary experience prior to starting the course at The Stroke Association. Whilst studying, I also volunteered with the Speech and Language Therapy team at my local hospital, as I knew that adult neuro and stroke was a particular area of interest to me and would be preferable as my career path. By the time I graduated, a job opportunity came up at my local hospital and fortunately, I was successful in the interview. By volunteering at the hospital and with the relevant client group, I was able to gain extra experience outside of my placements and gain specific knowledge about the Trust and being in the acute hospital environment.

I am now a band six speech and language therapist. My main caseload involves managing the communicate caseload. However, I am also working through my dysphagia competencies, so the end goal will be that dysphagia and communication are both within my role. I currently take part in the daily prioritisation and allocation of patients, liaise with the multi-disciplinary team (MDT) to gain information on how patients are managing with all professions, complete communication assessments, create therapy plans, carry out therapy, model therapy and strategies to families and other professionals, liaise with families and carers. I am also involved in MDT handovers on our stroke rehabilitation unit, discussing management of patients on our rehab unit, and providing support for our other band six speech and language therapists. I frequently liaise with other speech and language therapy teams to gain background knowledge of patients who have had previous speech and language therapy input, and every day general learning of new management approaches dependent on experiencing new neurological diagnosis and co-morbidities.

The speech and language therapy course requires numerous placements in different settings. I think it is a vital aspect of the course and profession as it exposes you to scenarios and professions that you just could not gain with lecture-only based courses, for example liaising with MDT, liaising with families, interacting with clients and patients, experiencing the work environment, and organising a patient caseload and triaging.

The lecturers and resource centre team at Manchester Met were all very approachable and happy to liaise with students at any time. I gained confidence requesting help and feel this is an incredibly useful skill to carry over into your career – knowing what you are comfortable doing but also knowing when you need help. I also gained good time management skills. The speech and language therapy course is very demanding – we frequently had over-lapping pressures and demands from placement, placement reflections, creating session plans, assignment deadlines and revising for exams. I had to learn to organise my time, which I did by creating myself a timetable of allocated time and keeping visual reminders about dates and deadline reminders. This helped me to evenly divide my time and effort between all course demands and requirements and helped to ease the stress of balancing and meeting deadlines.

I completed my newly qualified competencies shortly after graduating as I ensured I regularly reflected on sessions and was able to document examples of learning scenarios in a timely manner. I am still working through my dysphagia competencies to develop my role as a dysphagia-trained speech and language therapist.

My top tip for students is

I would definitely recommend gaining voluntary experiencing whilst studying (if you are able to do so) as it provides you with additional experience outside of your course. Speech and language therapy is a very competitive course and applying for jobs is also competitive. I was particularly interested to work in an area that I am very passionate about, and wanted to ensure I gained as much experience in the hospital setting as possible prior to job searching in order to make my application forms stand out.

I’m inspired by

All of the workforce within the NHS. They work incredibly hard with the sole aim of improving the quality of life and I am very grateful to work within such a great organisation.

What I loved about Manchester Met

I really appreciated how practical the course is and the resources that were available to us, for example the abundance of toys, books and resources that we could loan out for placement (this saved me a lot of money). Having hard copies of all speech and language therapy (adult and paediatric) assessments allowed me to feel prepared before all of my placements, as I knew carrying out assessments on placement was a fundamental part of learning.

I accessed the careers team when I applied for my job. I sent them my application form, along with the job criteria, and they proofread my form and gave advice on where I could provide more examples and reflections to fit with the job criteria, and helped with formatting my application form.

Tell your story

• Share your details