Paediatric Speech and Language Team redeployed to Adult Services
In light of recent events, staff members across the Trust are being re-trained and redeployed to different areas to assist with the ongoing epidemic. The aim is to ease pressure on areas of the hospital where patients are more prone to serious illness from Covid-19.
In this blog post, Clinical Lead Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist at The Royal London Children’s Hospital, Melanie Peck, shares her experience and explains how proud she is of her colleagues for stepping out of their professional comfort zone to support the Adult Services.
“My name is Mel. I have the great privilege of heading up a team of four full-time Acute Paediatric Speech and Language Therapists (SLT) working at The Royal London Hospital.
We specialise in the assessment and management of developmental and acquired communication, eating, drinking and swallowing difficulties in both infants and children. All SLT’s train in both adult and paediatrics, but quickly specialise in one area or the other once qualified.
So, you may wonder what we’re now doing on the adult wards!?
Well, three weeks ago we started rapid discussions with the Adult SLT team regarding how we could support each other in light of the growing coronavirus pandemic for business continuity. By sharing a matrix of transferable skills that we felt we could offer Adult Services if the need arose, the seed was set.
I will be totally honest when I say there were a few WhatsApp ‘scream’ emojis shared between us when I pitched this plan to the team. I’m sure many of you can appreciate the reality that as a paediatric SLT who has not seen an adult patient since being a student, being called upon suddenly to support adults is a scary one!
But, with a huge heart, courage, and the amazing collaboration and patience from the Adult SLT team at the RLH, they have supported us tremendously. They have provided us with upskilling sessions and orientated us to the wards, AND this week we’ve been out in force on the stroke unit, backfilling staffing by seeing patients with acquired swallowing and communications difficulties.
So, what’s it like?
Well… very strange but oddly wonderful!
The other day I went from feeding babies on the neonatal unit and finished my day by seeing a 71-year-old lady who had developed communication difficulties after a stroke.
She was on the unit with no family being able to visit. She was scared and unable to communicate and started crying when I said I was there to help her with her talking. The only human thing to do was to hold her hand, let her have a little cry and get to work by giving her the courage to use her voice again. By the time I left she was smiling and laughing and didn’t want me to leave.
This story is not unfamiliar to many SLT’s. We know how important communication is but in these unprecedented times it serves to remind us how vital services such as SLT continues to be. Patients may be scared, vulnerable and without the comfort of their family members. Add to this, the inability to communicate and suddenly being in the hospital setting is even more daunting.
For my team I cannot express how proud I am that they have both embraced and shown incredible flexibility to voluntarily see adult patients with very little preparation time. Every single team member has come back from seeing an adult patient smiling and happy that they could help. The Adult SLT’s have been so appreciative which has been wonderful. Over the coming months, I’m sure that many of us will need to step out of our professional comfort zone and apply lost, forgotten or even new skills to help each other out.
All I can say is jump in, remain humble to learn, think outside the box, and say ‘thank you’ to each other. Remember the reason why you joined the NHS was to help others in need, which right now includes each other.”
You can see the appreciation between both teams in the screenshot below. Great work!
#TeamBartsHealth
