Speech and language therapy service

You can expect:

• Your speech and language therapist is qualified and registered with the Health and Care Professions Council.
• We will telephone you or write to you to make arrangements for your first appointment.
• We will assess your/your child’s communication and/or eating and drinking abilities.
• We will then explain how we can help you.
• We will send you a written report after the assessment, and we may copy this to other relevant people (with your consent).
• Your therapist’s name and contact number will be on any letters or reports we send you.

Safeguarding Children and Adults

Are you worried about abuse? This might be physical, emotional, sexual, financial, institutional or neglect.

You can get help from Social Care at any time on these numbers:
Derbyshire: 01629 533190
W: www.derbyshire.gov.uk
Derby City:
Children: 01332 641172 (9 am—5pm)
Adults: 01332 642855 (9am—5pm)
Out of Hours: 01332 786968
W: www.derby.gov.uk 

Access to your records

You have the right to ask for a copy of your health records. Find out more here.

Accessible information

If you would like this information in a different format or language, please telephone 01246 515224 or  email dchst.communications@nhs.net

We will agree with you the most helpful way to communicate with you. This may be face to face, by telephone, video call, email, text message or a posted letter, and this may change depending on what we  need to communicate.

We try to use telephone and email as much as possible as this is the quickest and safest way to get important information to you. It also allows us to help the environment and to save money. Patients and their families may request paper copies of information but these may take longer to reach you.

Emails:

When sending emails, we must make sure we are doing so securely. We will check we have the correct email address for you, by sending a 'test email' first. We will wait for your reply before sending any further information

If you are the patient or parent of a patient under 18:

We will ask your consent before sending you any emails. We will also check you are happy for us to send you patient-identifiable information by email. Although our own email system (NHSmail) is secure, we cannot guarantee that information will still be secure once it arrives in your inbox. Your confidentiality may be at risk if your email account is hacked, or if you forward the email on.

If you are another professional:

We will send emails to other NHS professionals and to addresses ending in .gov.uk using NHS mail as this is fully encrypted end-to-end.

We will send emails to any other professionals as follows:

We will only send to a professional, work email address. We cannot send patient-identifiable information to other professionals via a personal email address (hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc). If you are in an education setting, please let us know the single preferred contact address for your setting.

We send emails using Egress, a secure online server, fully integrated with NHSmail. 

• You will receive an email inviting you to click a link to view the email (and any attachments) on the online Egress server. Please click the link.
• On the landing page, you will be invited to either login (if you already have an Egress account) or register for a free account.
• Once registered/logged in, you will be able to view the email and any attachments.
• You can download any attachments and save these to your own system, and then print off or forward them to other appropriate staff as indicated on the cc list (or with our additional consent for anyone not already on the cc list).
• You cannot download or forward the email itself.

Please do not forward the email invitation to another email address. It will only be accessible via the email address we originally sent it to. Forwarding will trigger an automated request for additional permissions which we may not be able to action.  Instead, if another person needs to see the email (rather than just the attachment), please reply to ask us to re-send the email to the new person. We will then send it direct to them and they will need to go through the process above.

If you have any difficulties, please contact the service on 01773 525079.

Volunteering for charities:
Many charities offer volunteering opportunities, click the links below to go to the relevant websites:

• Alzheimer's Society 
• Autism
• Headway
• ICAN
• Motor Neurone Disease Association
• MND: Become a Student Volunteer and help people affected by MND…
• Multiple Sclerosis Society Find out more about the volunteering opportunities available.
• Parkinsons
• Stroke Organisation
• Umbrella

Find out more about speech and language therapy as a career

Speech and language therapy is a very rewarding career. You can find out more about it from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists website.

Work experience/work shadowing

We are not able to offer routine work experience or shadowing opportunities, but we do try and help as much as we can. We can sometimes offer this depending on service availability. In the first instance please contact our wider workforce team and let us know what you would like to discuss.

University speech and language therapy training programmes do not require applicants to carry out shadowing of speech and language therapists. You can also get lots of information about the work of SLTs via your own research.

Job opportunities in our service

Our speech and language therapy service employs a range of staff:

• Specialist and experienced speech and language therapists
• Recently qualified speech and language therapists
• Speech and language therapists who are considering a return to practice
• Speech and language practitioners
• Speech and language therapy assistants
• Administrative support staff

All our external vacancies are advertised via the NHS jobs website.