Speech & Language Clinical Lead for Dysphagia

Job overview

This is an exciting opportunity for a Dysphagia Specialist Speech and Language Therapist to join the Children’s Therapies Team in North West Kent. This Band 7 role encompasses both leadership and clinical work in the community with children and families aged 0-19 years. The Children’s Therapies Team is an integrated therapies team providing Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Specialist Nurse Advisors and Care Co-ordinators to children and families within KCHFT.

You will be part of an innovative, cohesive and enthusiastic team of dysphagia therapists who have reimagined KCHFT’s dysphagia service. As part of our county-wide approach to the management of children with dysphagia, you will be able to offer virtual appointments to families across Kent, as well as locality-based face to face sessions. You will provide support and supervision to other clinicians in the team managing children with dysphagia and support competencies for therapists completing Dysphagia specialist training. You will access and lead on fortnightly group supervision and CPD sessions, whilst building links with external stakeholders. You will work with the other Dysphagia leads to monitor, review and develop pathways to ensure the service is able to offer safe, efficient and effective assessment and intervention in a timely way.

Main duties of the job

• Supporting and leading on the Dysphagia pathways across Kent
• Leading on service policy and clinical care pathways across KCHFT for dysphagia
• Ensuring team members are working to agreed care pathway within dysphagia
• Providing effective supervision, training and support to SLTs to enhance their CPD
• Reporting and advising on development requirements in dysphagia to colleagues, Professional Leads, Team Leads, Locality Clinical Manager and Head of Service.
• Participating in reflective practice and on going learning within these clinical fields
• Carrying out delegated line management of staff
• Managing a complex /specialist clinical caseload across 0-19 years

The role will be a hybrid model of working (virtual and face to face). We pride ourselves on the support and opportunities offered to staff at all stages in their career including; regular meetings with a line manager, access to supervision; in house and external training. We offer regular clinical governance days where all localities come together to share knowledge, skills and CPD experiences.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

As a community Trust many of our roles require individuals to be able to drive to perform their duties. As such you will be asked to confirm you have a full UK driving licence where driving is a requirement of the role to be able to proceed with your application.  We are committed to supporting candidates with disabilities into employment, if you are unable to drive due to a disability, please contact the Recruitment Team via [email protected] quoting the vacancy reference number so we can support you further.

The job description and person specification gives you all the information you need about this role. Please look carefully at the criteria in the person specification and tell us what you have done that shows you meet this in your application. If you need an application form in an alternative format please let our recruitment team know. All information you supply on your application should, to the best of your knowledge, be true and accurate.

Still have questions? The recruiting manager would love to hear from you, their contact details can be found in the job advert.

We can get a lot of applications for some roles so to be in with the best chance of being shortlisted please make sure you apply as soon as possible. A vacancy may close early if there is a lot of interest in the job.

At KCHFT we strongly encourage colleagues in clinical and non-clinical roles who have direct or social contact with patients to be fully vaccinated. In this way we will be doing all we can to ensure your safety and that of your colleagues and the patients we serve.

Find out more about the community difference here.

Good luck! We can’t wait to meet you and welcome you to #teamKCHFT, #cometocommunity.