AHPs Day special: Aine Murphy, My role as a Speech and Language Therapist at Barts
What is your job title?
Hi, I'm Aine. I'm a highly specialist speech and language therapist at St Bartholomew's Hospital.
What does being an AHP mean to you?
An AHP is a member of the multi-disciplinary team who isn’t a nurse or medical. As one of the therapists it’s nice to play an important role in the multi-disciplinary team to support patients and their carers when they’re acutely unwell and to help to provide the best outcomes to support them going back home.
What attracted you to becoming a Speech and Lanuage therapist?
I liked the idea of supporting people with communication difficulties to communicate their ideas and wishes. Initially I thought I would end up working with pre-school and school age children, but I enjoyed my adult placements and adult based learning at university.
How did you become a Speech and Lanuage Therapist?
I did a four year BSc degree straight after my final year at school. The degree covered a variety of areas and generally as one develops from a band 5 to band 6 therapist one starts to specialize in a particular area.
What does your job involve day to day?
Working in a hospital setting each day can be quite different. There are routine non-clinical commitments such as meetings, ward rounds and board rounds that I attend each week. We also run weekly instrumental swallow assessment clinics. Generally if I am working with fellow speech therapists we discuss the caseload, new referrals and non-clinical commitments for that day in the morning, allocate the caseload between us and then head on to the wards as soon as we can. We carryout joints with our AHP colleagues where able e.g. dietitians, occupational therapists.
What do you like most about your job?
Supporting a patient to swallow their first cup of tea safely after having spent a period nil by mouth (not eating or drinking) due to swallow difficulties or on limited modified consistencies or amounts if oral intake due to dysphagia (medical term for swallow difficulties).
What’s your proudest achievement in your role?
Developing a new instrumental swallow assessment service on our hospital site to support more complex patients to return to oral intake more quickly and safely.
What would you tell someone who is thinking of becoming a Speech and Language Therapist?
Try to get some practical experience working in the area that most appeals to you e.g. shadow opportunities, talk to your local speech and language therapy service team, attend an open day at a university.
What has been your biggest challenge in your role?
Promoting the role and importance of speech and language therapy involvement in critically unwell patients and raising our profile on ICU.