On Our Mind
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides integrated healthcare services including intellectual disability, mental health, community health, forensic and offender healthcare services across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire.
Our On Our Minds blog shares lived experiences from colleagues at the Trust and patients who use or have used our services on a variety of topics from a wide range of services.
Community Services Week: The valuable work of a speech and language therapist
As we mark Community Services Week, we celebrate the dedication and hard work of our community care teams. From nursing in homes to rehabilitation after illness, from caring for our youngest residents to supporting the elderly in their final stages of life, our community services are an essential pillar of health and well-being in Nottinghamshire.
Hear from Fay Taylor, Speech and Language Therapist, Community Intellectual Disability Team, who shares more about the valuable work she does with patients, supporting them to communicate their needs, wants and choices; or with their carers to improve communication. supporting people's eating, drinking and swallowing needs.
Tell us about your role and what a typical day looks like?
I'm a Speech and Language Therapist working in the Community Intellectual Disability Team (CIDT) in the West and North areas of the County. I cover Mansfield, Ashfield and Bassetlaw, supporting people with Intellectual Disabilities (sometimes still referred to as Learning Disabilities) within their community. I work either directly with people, supporting them to communicate their needs, wants and choices; or with their carers to improve communication and the other, less well known, part of a Speech and Language Therapist's role in terms of supporting people's eating, drinking and swallowing needs (swallowing problems are known as dysphagia).
One thing I love about my job is that there is no typical day. In the last few weeks, I've spent days delivering eating and drinking training to staff teams, carrying out assessments of people's understanding to support their communication, meeting with my multidisciplinary team colleagues to work jointly supporting individuals and their families, and developing resources to support people to communicate and understand their world better.
What do you enjoy about working in your role?
I enjoy the variety that I get working in the CIDT - no two clients are the same, no two days are the same and the quality of knowledge we have about our clients and their particular quirks, behaviours and interests is beyond something you could put a price on. Because we have our area teams, we know the people in our area, we know their carers, we know their families and we know people and approaches that have worked successfully in the past.
I enjoy being able to build relationships with clients and the people around them, and just the power to achieve a big change in someone's quality of life by doing something that often feels incredibly small.
I went into Speech and Language Therapy after my own experience as a parent of a child with significant communication difficulties - and knowing how difficult the world can be if you're struggling to communicate with it, and being able to change that in my role, it's incredibly rewarding. I'm also autistic myself and finding myself in a team of colleagues and working with a client group who are all the most wonderful, warm and accepting people - it's a sheer joy to be able to do that.
Give an example of how you have made a difference to someone you've cared for?
One which sticks in my mind and was behind my decision that I wanted to work in Intellectual Disability services was a lady who had historically been viewed as quite a difficult lady to engage. Taking the time to sit and build a rapport with her and understanding that she had a lifetime of difficult experiences with services and professionals and that lots of her difficult behaviour was the times when she didn't understand what someone was telling her. Also, helping her develop a plan of adjustments and strategies that could be used to help her access what people were trying to support her with.
Then I found out that she wasn't engaging with her child's school - not because she didn't want her child to succeed, but because all their communication was via one of the mobile phone apps schools tend to use these days, and she wasn't able to work a smartphone - a quick conversation with school, them agreeing to send paper letters home so she could go through them with a support worker to fully understand all the communication school was sending home, and we had a family suddenly engaging with education in a way that they'd never previously been able to do. Sometimes the smallest barriers can become a 20 foot high wall in someone's life and it just takes someone finding that tiny route through to make the change.
What advice would you give someone interested in a similar career?
Go for it. Speech and Language Therapy is such a huge world - and there are so many areas within it that you can find your niche where you can thrive. I retrained in my 40s and I only regret that I didn't do so sooner.
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