I feel completely useless in my job

[FeelUseless18]

I work as a children’s Speech Therapist in the NHS. I have been working there for 3 years now. All trusts are different but here in the North of England, our waiting lists are huge and I can only really see children for a small block before they then have to wait for a review.

The thing is, I don’t decide these things - it’s all down to how the trust is structured.

But I feel so useless.
I try my absolute hardest in the limited sessions I get with the children, and try so hard to make it useful.
But I feel like all I get from parents is complaints - how there’s not enough sessions, how they’re ‘pointless’, how their private therapists are much much better than us.
And when I know I’ve done a good job, it’s rare that we get a genuine thank you.

It’s made me feel so disheartened and honestly made me regret my career choice. I do my best and have trained so hard, to just be told it’s not good enough because of NHS strains out of my my control.

I don’t want to go private as I hate the idea of it. I just want to help people.

AIBU to consider a change in jobs?

I got like that as a teacher.

Bigger classes fewer teaching assistants. It just felt like I was working in a system that was falling apart.

I'm guessing SALT is the same - in order to see so many people management have told you to only do X session etc.

It is genuinely hard because you know you can do a good job if only you had the sessions.

It’s so true @Octavia64 I know I am good at what I do - but I either have 6 sessions to squeeze it in, or simply tell school what to do instead.
If I had unlimited sessions it’d be the dream…

NHS AHP here. It's exhausting and thankless. Not enough time for appointments, ridiculous waiting lists, unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved/documented in the time, issues with recruitment, a culture of doing secret hours of unpaid overtime to keep up which raises expectations about what others should be achieving. It's stressful and demoralising and the pay is terrible to boot! YANBU.

I am really lucky in my current team as we don’t have set number of sessions and can play it by ear. But we still get some comments about how useless we are. Not a lot. The overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
But I have been in teams where I was limited in how much I could do. Paeds is a whole other level though, I imagine. A few patients on my caseload are accompanied by parents and they are not hugely nice to deal with even when patients themselves are super laid back.
What helps me is a change in attitude. My primary goal is to give a person enough tools to manage their condition and problem-solve effectively. If they need me for far longer than I anticipated it means I am not doing my job properly. I would hate to work like GP physios where you get one appointment and a leaflet with exercises then that’s it. But I am finding that 6-8 sessions is enough to start making progress and a patient feels relatively confident to go away and try things out with some encouragement and a review in three months.
please don’t take it as me suggesting you don’t do your job properly. As I said, paeds is likely very different but a shift from “treating” to “coaching” really helped me to focus my sessions.

YANBU but in your shoes I’d reconsider partly or fully switching to private work, given the problems you outline with the NHS provision.

I understand your point about wanting to stay in the NHS, but the fact is they are not structured so you can effectively help people. It means you get complaints and can't use your skills effectively. Why not take on some private work and see how it goes? I realise it may go against the grain to not be in the NHS but surely it's better to have far fewer complaints and be able to effectively help people rather than struggle on in a system you can't change. FWIW my DS was referred to an NHS speech therapist, but (not criticising the therapist) but the very few sessions were useless and rushed. We went private and it massively helped.