Specialist Speech

**Band 6 - Specialist Speech and Language Therapist**: Two posts available

We are keen to appoint a Speech and Language Therapist to join our specialist Developmental Communication Disorders team. This team work within the County Durham area providing assessment and intervention for children in a range of settings.

We recognise that this is a specialist area and as such, have devised a development framework to support therapists currently working at a band 5 level, who are interested in developing into this role with structured support.

**This post will provide the opportunity for a clinician to**:

- Work with children with a varied range of communication disorders including neurodevelopmental disorders, selective mutism and developmental language disorder.
- Work within specialist education settings providing therapy and working collaboratively with education teams.
- Work in partnership with both professionals and families.

Develop skills in delivering supervision to other members of the Speech and Language Therapy team.

At North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust our main priority is, and always will be, to provide safe and high quality care to our patients every day; the kind of care we would want for ourselves and our loved ones. We want our organisation to be the best place to work with the right staff, in the right roles, at the right time, to ensure we deliver exceptional patient care and experience.

We will support staff through providing an inclusive and supportive workplace with health and well-being initiatives, staff benefits and opportunities for personal and professional development. Staff recognition is very important to us; as well as performance reviews and appraisals, we recognise staff through Star and Team of the month, colleague recognition - a note of thanks, Managers Awards, Shining Stars and Service Awards.

We recruit for values and “Together we are North Tees & Hartlepool”
1. Generate appropriate strategies to manage an individual specialist caseload including the assessment, diagnosis, treatment and discharge of a diverse range of clients with complex communication difficulties with support and supervision from lead clinician.
2. Develop and implement specialist care protocols and programmes of care and treatment, to meet the needs of clients in conjunction with their parents, carers, education staff and other members of the appropriate multi-disciplinary team (MDT) with support and supervision from the lead clinician.
3. Independently manage and negotiate the management of the needs of the children referred to the neurodevelopmental pathway with others in the diagnostic team e.g. onward referral to highly specialist clinicians or other specialist support agencies e.g. Consultants, Educational Psychologists.
4. To provide specialist advice to the Autism Diagnostic Teams to contribute to the diagnosis of children with social communication difficulties.
5. To ensure clients/families are involved in the planning and prioritisation of their care plans wherever possible.
6. Provide specialist education, training and supervision to speech and language therapy assistant practitioners and to speech and language therapists with less experience in the management of the client group, with appropriate supervision from the clinical lead.
7. Provide specialist advice and second opinions to less experienced colleagues.
8. Contribute to the planning, implementation and evaluation of teaching and training in the specialist area to parents, carers, volunteers and professionals involved in the care of the client group with support from the lead clinician and professionals.