TL;DR SLT career journeys won’t always be straightforward. It’s ok to not know everything. Know what you need to figure out, and where you can find the answer. As SLTs, we also need to know what questions to ask when patients present with suicidal ideation, and how to differentiate between psych patients and patients with communication disorders. On April 18th, 2023, Maya Soni, PhD, joined us and shared with us what her role is all about, knowledge about her client group, fun facts about speech, language and dysphagia (swallowing difficulties), and how she overcame and made the most of the ch ..read more

Article written collaboratively with Emma Cleary, Speech and Language Therapist at the Rampton High Secure Hospital. Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself My name is Emma Cleary, and I am a speech and language therapist (SLT) working at the Rampton High Secure Hospital. Note from editor: Rampton High Secure Hospital is one of three high security hospitals in England and Wales. Patients are only admitted to Rampton Hospital if they are referred by a health professional and assessed by the Hospital as meeting the criteria for admission. All patients admitted to a clinical service in the Hospit ..read more

Article written by Emma Cleary, Speech and Language Therapist at Rampton High Secure Hospital. A typical week for me may look like this: To explain this a little bit more clearly, I’ll take Monday more in depth. Rampton High Secure Hospital is one of three high secure hospitals in England and Wales. All patients admitted to Rampton are detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, and are classified as having a learning disability, mental illness, and/ or personality disorder. I work across 2 care streams: Mental Health and Personality Disorder, and on Mondays I work in Mental Health. Handover m ..read more

Article written collaboratively with Steph Hammond, Team Manager for Adult Community SLT and Highly Specialist Speech & Language Therapist in Mental Health and Criminal Justice (Dorset, UK), Secretary of Mouthcare Clinical Excellence Network (RCSLT CEN) Q: Tell us a bit more about your journey so far - what has led you to this varied role? Genuinely, it has all happened by sheer coincidence! I think I just got lucky and as I say I have a really supportive manager. The team manager role happened following a secondment and I was persuaded to “just try it out” for 6 months, which I did. Then ..read more

First day at your adults SLT job at a stroke ward, you’re raring to go. You finished ward round meeting, and you look through the list of patients you need to see for the day. Many of them are new referrals. What do you do? You decide to look at patient’s case history or their most recent notes. But then you realise that patient notes are not even available!! Because you just finished ward rounds and they are being used somewhere! (It happens… Quite often). What do you do then? Panic! You don't have all the information! How can you do your job? Relax - you do have some information, even the m ..read more

This is the situation: You managed to have the therapy session, but it just didn't seem to go anywhere you imagined it to be despite all the prep work you have done. You come out of the therapy session thinking, 'This went really bad. I am struggling. I'm not a good therapist.'? (Even your usually apathetic cat can tell something's off about you) Does this sound familiar? Before you continue to indulge in beating yourself down, take a step back. Let's figure this out together. You might be familiar with Gibb's reflective model. This is a great way to reflect on a session and to develop an act ..read more

Great question. First, you can choose whether you want to become a mentor or a mentee. Mentees As you sign up as a mentee, you can tell us what your goals are, what areas you would like to develop. For example, some of our mentees have set themselves goals to develop their leadership skills or clinical analysis. Some mentees also wish to learn more about progressing their careers, finding their niche, or just speaking to a working ST mentor about applying what they are learning to real-life scenarios. Next, our team works hard to match you up with a mentor with areas of expertise and knowledg ..read more

Mentoring is when an individual is facilitated in their self-discovery and progression with their ideas, learning, personal and professional development. (Oxley et al 2005, Houghton 2005; RCSLT CPD Toolkit 2017) This might look like listening to someone share their experiences in a field, learning different perspectives… It's slightly different from supervision and coaching, where the focus may be more on clinical problem solving or solution focused reflection. What does mentoring involve? Usually, mentoring involves the mentor and mentee meeting regularly to discuss topics and/or specific qu ..read more

We were privileged to have Andrea Fernando (Paediatric Mainstream SLT, ST Links Mentor) and Serena Lo (Special School SLT, ST Links Founder) co-lead this journal club on autistic self-advocacy and neurodiversity. This is part one of our series hoping to explore a range of journals behind neurodiversity and its implications on our practice as SLTs. We had insightful discussions and learnings coming from therapists who are at different stages of their journey. We discussed our views on neurodiversity, disability and shared key points from the paper. Here are some of my key learnings from the jo ..read more

Tell us about your job! I’m currently working at a Women’s and Children’s hospital in Singapore, working mainly with the paediatric population. The caseload here is pretty varied; I’ve worked with children with speech, language and voice difficulties in the outpatient setting, and I’m currently doing my inpatient rotation - which involves working with the neonatal and paediatric population with feeding and swallowing difficulties in the inpatient setting. What has been your journey to SLT like? I’ve always known I want to work in the healthcare industry, which explains my background in biomedi ..read more