Speech and language therapist at NHS Shetland

The job at NHS Shetland

Speech and language therapists assess and treat difficulties with communication and with eating, drinking and swallowing. With children that can mean unclear speech, delayed or disordered language, stammering, autism and the communication needs of cleft palate or hearing loss; with adults it can mean aphasia and dysarthria after stroke, voice disorders, head and neck cancer, progressive neurological disease and dementia. Dysphagia work involves bedside swallow assessment, videofluoroscopy, modified diets and training families and ward staff to feed people safely. Children and adults with speech, language, communication or swallowing needs, including people after stroke or brain injury, autistic people, people with learning disabilities, progressive neurological conditions, head and neck cancer and voice disorders.

At a health board such as NHS Shetland, that work means a caseload that can span the whole pathway — acute wards, outpatient clinics and community teams — without changing employer, because the board is responsible for all NHS care in its area. Boards often run broad rotations across acute and community services, and specialising later rarely means leaving the organisation. Across the profession as a whole, speech and language therapists work in settings including NHS acute trust, community health services, mainstream and special schools, early years settings and stroke and neuro-rehabilitation units — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so NHS Shetland pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in Scotland pays it: £34,544 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in Scotland was £39,719 in 2025. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.

This page states no figure specific to NHS Shetland because none is published in the open data. When the workforce and staff survey feeds include this organisation, the establishment size, the response rate and the theme scores will appear above.