Anyone have any idea what the LA will say their SALT hourly rate is for ds - or know where I can find out?

[Starchart]

Ta very much.

or anyone have the costs laid out in their tribunal decision?

What you need to look up is the national refernce cost for SLT. Last timde I looked it was about £70 an hour.

Thank you Working. That is really helpful.

Hmmm, I think it is £97 per hour but it isn't data that I' used to.

That's interesting. Do you have a link to the reference that quotes this?
Thanks

Erm, I'll link to it when I have Internet access again. On middle of house move so I grab the web where I can but it isn't at home.

Sorry more explanation - I'm posting from phone now.

Thanks Star - I hope that the move goes smoothly!

It'shere but you have to go into one of the Appendices and find it, NSCR01 - it's in NHS OPAT Total I think (Outpatient).

It is £98 now. As a Highly Specialist SLT (Band 7) a few points up the scale, I think I see about £22 of this: the rest is overheads, maintaining clinics, management costs, admin, NHS mandatory training etc.

That £22 is gross btw

And I bet in reality you're expected to do most of the admin yourself too?

Not all of it. We have 3 admin staff (2 WTE I think) for between 50 and 60 staff and given the amount of reports generated, we have to do some. They book initial appointments, act as a central point for phonecalls, redirect phonecalls/messages, keep a track of our mandatory training/annual leave, co-ordinate group invites, file and archive discharges etc. They are pretty busy.

RCSLT recommend that we are supposed to write a report everytime we look sideways we see a patient for the first time, at the end of a block of therapy, after any meetings etc. Really there is no need for half of it and far too much time is wasted spent on meaningless reports when the service would be far better if people could use this time to actually see our clients and get stuck in. A report is not a service, or at least rarely so (exceptions being high stakes assessment like stat assessment or for DLA etc).

Star, off topic, I have been thinking of you this week, I am doing a lot of reading on clinical pragmatics. There is a book called Clinical Pragmatics by Louise Cummings which is very critical of what passes as "pragmatics" in SLT and research, it has some very enlightening passages about the lack of a proper theoretical underpinning to many interventions which seem to be based on describing pragmatics rather than any coherent model of it.

There's also a book called "Effective Speech Pathology" by John Muma which is highly critical of the lack of construct validity/fitness for purpose of many SLT assessments.

John Muma is no fan of behaviourism and has been highly critical of its place in language intervention as it isn't considered a complete account of language development but his scathing critique of SLT is still worth a gander. Some of it is hard enough to read as he assumes an awful lot of knowledge but in and amongst a lot of self-pompous guff there are some great insights. There's a great quote about how these tasks that bear no reality to real life are used to make decisions about the lives of the young people who participate in them when they have never encountered a task like it before and likely never will again... did I write it down? Of course not. Silly me..

Thank you. That's very helpful Working.

Bet the LA will quote the £22 figure as our case rests on costs.

Or probably much less akin to a new starter.

Blimmin phone. Sorry Working. Typed long message in response to your but impossible on m25 so will try again later.