Clinical Lead Speech and Language Therapist, Mental Health

This is an exiting opportunity to lead a small team of Speech and Language Therapist working in Mental Health Services on both wards and in the community.

The service is commissioned by Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust soon to become North London Mental Health Partnership NHS trust.

The post holder will be responsible for leading the SLT service, managing referrals, clinical supervision, students, training and providing quarterly reports for the trust. They will also continue working in partnership with SLT colleagues in the new trust and Whittington Health SLT alliance to foster new opportunities including CPD and trust initiatives relating to SLT.

Main duties of the job

The SLT team in Mental Health provide a specialist service to adults and older people with mental health problems in a wide range of hospital and community settings across Camden and Islington.

The post holder is an autonomous practitioner and is responsible for overseeing the clinical work of the SLT team. They are responsible for organising and managing a defined caseload of adults and older people while delivering a comprehensive and highly specialist service to adults and older people with a wide range of complex speech, language, communication and swallowing problems associated with mental health problems and / or neurological deficit. They will lead on providing advice, guidance, support and training for clients, carers, nursing staff and other professionals.

The post holder will take the lead in the provision of the dysphagia service and management of older people with mental health problems, setting priorities, initiating clinical protocols and service developments as appropriate. They will set up and lead project groups within the service and on a multi-disciplinary basis.

The post holder will initiate and take a lead for quality improvement projects to be undertaken within the team as required. They will oversee and coordinate data collection within the team.

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.