Speech and language therapist at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

The job at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS 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 acute trust such as Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, that work means an acute hospital caseload — inpatients on the wards, emergency and critical care, theatres and diagnostics, and hospital outpatient clinics, with the working day shaped by admissions, ward rounds and discharge planning. Newly qualified posts here are usually rotational: four to six months at a time in a different clinical area, which is how you find out what you want to specialise in before you commit. 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 Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in the South East was £39,983 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.