I recently took part in a health professions morning at a school in East London. It’s an event where the local authority invite people working in and studying all sorts of different health professions, and students get the chance to listen to each person talk for about ten minutes, and then get to ask questions about how they decided what they want to do, how they got onto the course they studied, what their day-to-day routine is like…basically anything. I spoke at the same event last year, and it was lovely to hear that students who had no idea what SLT is or what we do came away thinking that it was an interesting profession. I also realised that there was a definite split in the group-those who knew what SLT is, usually because of their own or a family member’s experience, and those who thought we deal with lisps (we don’t, by the way).

This got me thinking. What do my friends and family think we do? Being curious, I asked them. I deliberately only asked people who do not work as or study SLT, because I thought that might be slightly cheating. I asked people who have had all sorts of different jobs, some who’ve had speech therapy and some who have not. They are different ages and have different ideas about the profession and the course. So I pretty much harassed them into making a selfie video-type thing, and I have artfully put them together. I’m not going to say too much about it, just that it was fascinating to hear what people think we do- it made me think even more strongly that letting people know about our job is so, so vital.

I hope you enjoy.

If you would like to learn more about studying Speech and Language Therapy at City, you can visit the course page here.