New Speech and Language Therapy (SaLT) service set to launch

Norfolk County Council and the CCGs for Norwich, North, South and West Norfolk have commissioned East Coast Community Healthcare (ECCH) to deliver a new Speech and Language Therapy service for children and young people aged 0-19 from April 4th 2016.

The new model focusses on supporting children and young people with speech, language and communication needs in their everyday environment such as their school, rather than in clinics, to minimise the disruption to teachers and the child's education. ECCH therapists will be providing specialist support and also training others, including the child's family and teachers, to support their communication development closer to home. There is evidence that this is more effective than traditional methods for meeting their communication needs and this approach is recommended and advocated by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

The new way of working is based on Maria Gascoigne's Balanced System Model and will enable ECCH's therapists to target their specialist skills where they are most needed. A single point of access will be available for referrals seven days a week and an advice line will be set up for service users.

Claire Taylor, East Norfolk Paediatric Speech & Language Team Leader said: This is about partnership working and has a greater emphasis on speech and language therapists working holistically with teachers and schools rather than in isolation. Being locally based, we will be coming into your settings much more and working with children whether it be in the classroom or, at times, we may need to see them on their own. What we don't want to be doing is taking a child out of school for half a day for a half hour appointment.

What we would like to happen is that schools will enable us to have a space to do an assessment should we need to, or we may just come to spend some time in the classroom looking at strategies that teachers can implement on a day to day basis to enable children to develop their skills. We want to support teachers by understanding the issues for implementing strategies in your particular class and making our advice specific to you.

The new model will be introduced over a six month period. Regular progress will be reported via the East Coast Community Healthcare website: www.ecch.org.