Letter received from Children and Young People's Therapy Service:

We are writing to inform you of the current status of the Speech Language Therapy provision in the Children and Young People’s Therapy Service. 

At the present time we have a significantly reduced workforce with many vacancies across the county, meaning that our teams are working at below half capacity. This is clearly causing difficulties for the remaining staff to cover existing mainstream caseloads, to fulfil initial assessment and EHCP responsibilities, and to maintain presence in Specialist Education settings.  We would like to reassure you that as a service we are doing our utmost to continue to provide support for the children in your school but would ask that you remain patient with our staff.

 As a service we are taking the following steps within specialist provision settings

• Continuing to see new referrals to identify needs
• Focussing on Key stage 1 children to underpin our commitment to early intervention
• Prioritising those children without functional communication and urgent cases where communication systems are not already established
• Once a communication system is in place, the child’s case will be closed with ongoing advice in place to support their needs.

We would ask that you support your staff to follow the advice on the intervention plans and also to utilise the advice sheets in the Fact Files, please see our website Fact Files - Children and Young People's Therapy Service - Somerset NHS Foundation Trust (somersetft.nhs.uk)

We will be monitoring this situation over the next few months and hope that we can see improvements in staffing levels later this year.  If you have any feedback, or any questions, please email CYPTherapyService@somersetft.nhs.uk  so we can continue to monitor the impact of these vacancies.

Yours faithfully

Ruth Wood                                                      Natasha Smith

Operational Service Manager                        Operational Service Manager

Children and Young People’s Therapy Service

Somerset Foundation Trust