Speech and language therapist at South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust

The job at South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust

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 an integrated care organisation such as South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, that work means a caseload that can cross the ward, the outpatient clinic and the patient’s home inside a single organisation, because acute and community services sit under one employer. Rotations can follow the pathway rather than the building, so you can see the same patient group in hospital and at home without applying for a different job. 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 South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in Northern Ireland pays it: £31,049 at the bottom of the band on the 2025/26 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in Northern Ireland was £37,052 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 South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust 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.