Hospital, Acute & Care Settings — Specialist SLT and Dysphagia Services
Senior clinical expertise, clear governance and a pragmatic understanding of what works in busy hospital and care environments.
We have extensive experience working within hospital and care settings, providing specialist speech and language therapy input for patients and residents with complex communication and swallowing needs.
Whether supporting an individual at the bedside or working at a service level to develop and embed specialist provision, we bring senior clinical expertise, clear governance and a pragmatic understanding of what works in busy clinical environments.
We work routinely within:
- Acute and rehabilitation wards, supporting patients with neurological, respiratory and surgical presentations
- Nursing homes and residential care settings, providing specialist dysphagia and communication support for residents with complex and long-term needs
- Complex and advanced dysphagia assessment and management, including tracheostomy
- Home-based and hospital FEES assessment (Fibreoptic Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing) — gold-standard instrumental swallowing assessment
- Videofluoroscopy (VFS) — specialist radiological swallowing assessment carried out in collaboration with radiology teams
- Service development — designing, establishing and embedding specialist dysphagia services within hospitals, healthcare organisations and care settings
- Training and supervision of nursing staff, healthcare assistants, care staff and allied health professionals in communication and swallowing support
- Clear clinical reporting and handover documentation to support safe discharge planning and onward care
- MDT meeting and case conferences
We understand the pressures of acute and care environments. Our aim is always to provide specialist input that is clinically rigorous, practically deliverable and genuinely useful to the teams we work alongside.
Swallowing safety and effective communication are not optional extras in acute care — they are fundamental to recovery and safe discharge.
From the people we support.
Myself and my family will be forever grateful to Sam for her clinical expertise, professionalism and bedside manner in dealing with me at such a critical and anxious time.
Sam and the Talkabout Speech Therapy team have provided an incredible service to our patients for many years. Over this time we have seen a marked increase in patients requiring SLT input and the Talkabout team have always been extremely responsive to these changing needs. They work closely with us to the point we consider them to be integral to our team. The quality of their practise is consistently high – patient assessments, the building of therapeutic relationships, individualised treatment planning, advice to the MDT, the coaching and training of our staff, quality of communication, report writing…the list goes on. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have Sam and her team working alongside us to ensure our patients receive optimal quality in the care they receive.
From a single bedside referral to a full service build.
Tell us what you need — single-case input, ongoing cover, or a dysphagia service designed and embedded from the ground up.