Building on the profiles of alternative healthcare careers we’ve been blogging about over the last couple of weeks–all part of our plan to help you good folks see that if you’re interested in helping people but don’t think you’d be suited to the life of a doctor or nurse there are other options out there–today we’d like to tell you a bit about the work of the speech and language therapist. It’s a job that allows those who do it to make a hugely positive difference to the lives of the people they work with, as well as develop real expertise in a fascinating area of the health sciences.

Let’s first look at the question of what a speech therapist does. There are a wide range of speech disorders that people can suffer from–some are psychological, some are due to physical issues, and others are the side effects of other health problems such as suffering a stroke or deafness–and it’s the job of the speech therapist to work directly with patients who suffer difficulties in speaking as a result of any of these things with the goal of managing and helping them to overcome or recover from their condition. In some ways, however, the job title is a little misleading, as speech therapists also treat conditions that inhibit people’s ability to swallow, eat or drink, all of which, you don’t need us to tell you, are vital functions for any human being.

So it’s a career that offers real opportunities to help people regain some of the most valuable bodily functions they have, which in turn has the potential to transform their quality of life. And the bulk of the speech therapist’s work involves working directly, on a one-to-one basis, with sufferers of these conditions. Usually a speech therapist will initially assess a new patient, before then developing a treatment plan based on that assessment. The patient and the therapist then regularly meet for treatment sessions. Because many speech problems are a result of other conditions, speech therapist have plenty of opportunities to work with other healthcare specialists, both in terms of liaising with them regarding individual patients and providing advice, for example, to care workers in environments in which speech problems can develop, such as care homes for the elderly.

Considering that this is a career that involves developing substantial healthcare knowledge and carrying out treatment, people are often surprised to learn that the entry requirements to train as a speech therapist are not so heavily science oriented as you might expect. Qualification comes through completing a degree in speech and language therapy/science that has been accredited by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Although some universities offering this course specify one science A Level, this is not the case across the board, meaning that if you don’t have a science-heavy A Level set then you’re by no means excluded from this profession.