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Living the Trust Values

Our Trust values are:

4-Values -lockup -2

Our service strives to actively embody these values.

Supportive 

  • All team members are well supported through a robust supervision structure including formal 1:1 clinical supervision every six weeks, peer supervision sessions every eight weeks, and informal ad hoc supervision as required. Our team members value these opportunities to seek support from mentors and peers, to share ideas, and to address clinical, professional, and personal topics
  • All team members are encouraged to create a wellness action plan to share with their supervisor. This provides an opportunity to open a conversation around wellbeing, including identifying any individual early warning signs or triggers, and discussing what support is needed for each team member to stay mentally healthy at work
  • We hold virtual fortnightly whole service huddles to support team members across sites by cascading information, problem-solving issues, and celebrating successes within the team
  • Each clinical specialty team within our service holds 6-weekly pathway specific meetings to review projects, provide a forum for group reflection, and reflect on complex clinical cases
  • We also hold bi-annual whole service meetings to discuss service development priorities and plans, hear updates from each pathway, and discuss service level issues

Respectful 

  • A core part of our role is to support patients with communication difficulties in making their needs, wants, values and beliefs known. This might include using our specialist knowledge to support patients with language difficulties make decisions about their care, or supporting the early use of a speaking valve or in-dwelling voice prosthesis for patients with tracheostomies or laryngectomies. We believe that good communication is the foundation of promoting dignity in healthcare
  • We are actively committed to inclusion in everything we do for patients, staff members and the public. Our operational team lead is leading on EDI advocacy across the Therapies department to ensure we are creating an inclusive team where everybody can thrive
  • We respect the opinions and ideas of all team members and regularly seek feedback via pathway meetings, huddles, surveys, supervision, and feedback boxes based on all sites. We aim to ensure that the voice of every team member is heard

Innovative

  • In 2023, we launched a team based within front door services (A&E and assessment units) across UHBW sites. Early results indicate that this is helping the right patients get the right care at the right time. This is a new area of specialism for the profession so we have founded and are chairing a national clinical excellence network for speech and language therapists working in front door services to share learning more widely. 
  • Our speech and language therapy team based at the Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre (BHOC) have been working with colleagues in other major NHS Haematology centres to share clinical experience of swallowing and communication disorders in patients with haematological conditions. To share this more widely, we have written an article on this speciality for our SLT professional Bulletin, available here and are now devleoping this into a research project
  • We are excited to be part of a new regional ECMO service based at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. ECMO is a specialist treatment providing additional respiratory support to critically unwell patients and is only provided at a small number of hospitals throughout England. Our team will be supporting swallowing and communication for patients undergoing ECMO as part of their critical care admission
  • We have a rolling weekly in-service training programme   to ensure we are delivering high quality, evidence-based care for our patients. All team members contribute to share learning from continuing professional development activities and service development projects
  • We have supported two junior team members through the Healthcare Leadership Academy scholarship (aimed at therapists within their first five years of qualifying) as part of our ethos of encouraging frontline leadership. They both completed and presented innovative service-wide development projects to improve the care we give our patients. See here for more details
  • A critical care communication chart was developed by our Weston team in collaboration with Widgit - a company that specialises in products that use symbols to support text, helping people read, understand and communicate. The project was born out of a desire to support medical staff communicate with critically unwell patients at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and has received international recognition and been downloaded many thousands of times. See here for more details
  • In response to our 2020 organisational merge between Bristol and Weston, we started a bi-monthly newsletter to help create a sense of being one service across sites. One of our wonderful speech and language therapy assistants pulls together updates from across the pathways and features a section where we "meet" a different therapist in each edition. It has been really well received and other departments within the Trust are now following suit

Collaborative 

  • Members of our team are embedded in specialist multidisciplinary teams across pathways to ensure we are advocating for our patients and delivering high quality services. This includes involvement with the South Bristol movement disorders clinic, Macmillan support clinic, and ENT and Max Fax clinics
  • Our operational lead manages the nutrition and dietetics service, in addition to our speech and language therapy service. This helps the two services to work collaboratively, maximise efficiency, and deliver joined-up patient care
  • Our dysphagia lead sits on the Trust nutrition and hydration steering group alongside representatives from nursing, dietetics, food policy and catering to develop strategy and policies relating to nutrition/ hydration throughout the Trust, as well as promoting the needs of patients with dysphagia to improve their care
  • We have been collaborating with local acute hospitals and community services to develop a toolkit to support decision-making and documentation for patients who are eating and drinking with acknowledged risk. This collaboration aims to enable smoother transitions and clearer communication for patients who move between different teams within the region.