"A day without laughter is a day wasted..."

Last week I talked at a Lost Voice Guy Gig in Newcastle about Speech and Language Therapy. It was organised by the SLT Society at Newcastle University and I was delighted to be invited to take part.

RCSLT contacted me before Christmas and asked me if I would be interested in talking at the event. I’d be lying if I said the audience of 160 wasn’t rather daunting, but I agreed that I’d be happy to talk to the students to find out what they required.

 A few emails later and I’d agreed to a 5 minute slot at the beginning of the night. Giving Voice rep and final year student, Fran, was really helpful regarding running order of the evening and possible content for my speech.

I began to write my talk when I was off work over Christmas, and although I was quite happy with the first draft, I knew it still needed some work. Like all good things, I left it for a little while, whilst still thinking about it, to let the ideas grow and develop.

As 21^st January approached I knew I needed to work on it a little more so I spent some time re-drafting (and practising on my family). I also discussed it with some of my closest friends (some of whom are also SLTs) for honest feedback. All the feedback was positive, with some ideas for potential extras, so I made a few minor edits in the few days before the big night.

The Friday before I spoke to Derek Munn, from RCSLT, who was also planning to talk on the night, so that we could ensure that our talks complemented each other.

I was excited about talking at the event but also quite nervous. The audience would be expecting comedy and they’d be getting 5 minutes of me: a speech and language therapist who usually only makes people laugh by accident – something I definitely didn’t want to do on stage in front of so many people.

Fran and the other students very kindly arranged tickets for my husband and I to stay and watch the show. We arrived about an hour before it started so that I could see the stage area and have a run through of my speech. By this point I was feeling nervous but I was well prepared and was happy with what I’d written.

Talking in public always reminds me of the complexities of communication. Being under pressure, I worry I might talk too quickly, forget the words I need, or say them in the wrong order – something that people with communication difficulties may worry about every day.

I had chance to talk to the students and to Derek before the start of the show and it was great to feel the excitement and enthusiasm of everyone. I was also very excited to see my name was on the poster! (This was made even more exciting as it’s the first Giving Voice event I’ve been at since I got married last July). 

The students introduced the evening and then it was my turn to talk. I felt nervous, but I was excited to raise some awareness of Speech and Language Therapy. In my everyday life I talk a lot, so standing on stage in front of an audience should be easy, after all communication is what I do for a living. That didn’t make it easy but it did mean I was equipped with the skills and knowledge to deliver the speech effectively. The speech went well and I got a few laughs (in appropriate places!) 

I talked about how important communication is, a brief overview of my involvement in Giving Voice (and arranging comedy gigs starring Lost Voice Guy), the Voice Box joke competition and finished with the range of client groups SLTs work with. I also included some key facts such as 20% of the population may need a Speech and Language Therapist at some point in their lives. That’s 1 in 5 of us.  I wanted to use some facts would reach out to people and that they might remember long after the comedy was over.

The comedy was great; starting the night was Mr Joe King followed by Joby Mageean. We then had a 20 minute interval before the students welcomed us back for the final act. Derek gave an inspirational speech about the importance of communication before introducing Lost Voice Guy to the stage. He was as brilliant as ever and had the audience in stiches!

The students concluded the night with a few thank yous (while Lost Voice Guy came back on stage ‘just for some more attention!’)

It was a brilliant night and the students should be so proud of themselves for organising it.

Communication is integral to us as humans and I love that comedy brings us together for a shared experience in laughter. We definitely had that; whilst also raising awareness of SLT and fundraising for the Percy Hedley Foundation. 

Derek and I with the amazing student team

“A day without laughter is a day wasted” Charlie Chaplin

Meeting a Dragon? I'm in!

Last night I went out in Newcastle with my friends. I only decided yesterday afternoon that I would be going out and I am so glad that I did!!

As it was raining we decided to head to The Gate as its all indoors and this would minimise the amount of time we would get wet! When we arrived at Bannatyne my friend informed us that Duncan Bannatyne himself had just been in! We decided to hang around there a while longer in case he came back, and to our delight he did. We asked him for a photo, to which he happily agreed! About 5 minutes later we decided to go and see him again to get some more photos and to have a chat with him. He was more than happy to chat to us and I gave him a Giving Voice pen and told him that Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives. I was delighted that he put the pen in his pocket!

About an hour later I was ordering a drink in another bar and found myself standing next to Duncan again. He said hello and I took the opportunity to raise some more awareness of SLT.

Me: “Did you know that 2.5 people in the UK have speech, language or communication needs?”

Duncan: “I did know that. How do you know?”

I told him that I am a speech and language therapist and he told me about his involvement with Operation Smile UK and his recent trip to Mexico! Click here to find out more!

It was a pleasure to meet him and to have the opportunity to engage in a speech and language therapy related conversation – especially as it was totally unexpected! I always carry a Giving Voice pen with me (even on a night out!) as you never know who you might bump into to spread the message one person further that Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives. Wouldn’t it be great if we see him use his new Giving Voice pen on the next series of Dragons Den?! (haha)

Me and Duncan just before I gave him the pen :)

On another note, just one week to go until afternoon tea! I am looking forward to raising awareness of Giving Voice and some much needed funds for the North East Trust for Aphasia, supporting people with language and communication difficulties following a stroke or other brain injury. I emailed the News Post Leader last week about the event and was delighted to see a short piece printed in this week’s edition! Contact me if would like a ticket :-)

News Post Leader

All in all a very exciting couple of days!  

Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives

A song, a speech and some Ukulele's!

A few weeks ago, fellow speech and language therapist, Liz Panton, asked me if I would like to attend an open mic spot at Bar Loco, Newcastle to promote Giving Voice. I agreed to attend and prepared a short speech about the campaign. Liz planned to perform her Giving Voice song on her ukulele followed by a little talk from me. Liz also asked me to take my own ukulele along and the Left Hand Stairs Uke group also played the song.

I arrived feeling slightly nervous as I hadn’t been to Bar Loco previously and my uke hadn’t been out of its case in over a year! Once Liz arrived we started setting up as we were on first. Liz introduced us and sang the song and we played along on our uke’s with her. The audience looked quite interested and I was looking forward to sharing some information about the campaign. Once Liz finished the song I spoke for a minute or two about who I am and what Giving Voice is. I planned to say more than I did, but kept it a little shorter, due to a mixture of nerves and keeping the audience interested. I told them I had leaflets and pens if anyone wanted to find out more about Giving Voice.

Liz then told people how they could find out more on twitter (#GivingVoiceUK) and also explained that Newcastle students are participating in ‘No Voice week’ this week (@DVoiced) Find out more about what they have been up to by reading their brilliant blog here!

We then played the song again this time missing out words for the audience to join in. I think everyone enjoyed it and someone asked for some leaflets after the performance. I also left a few behind after I left so we managed to spread the message a little bit further.

I think Liz had a brilliant idea in performing at an event like this as it was something interesting for the audience as well as raising awareness in a different type of situation. Well done Liz!!

Here’s the videos from the night (thanks to the man with the iPad!) My speech is in part two, but the beginning of it is missing. Enjoy!

Liz and me after the performance :)

Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives



Giving Voice Harlem Shake...Newcastle

I’d like to welcome a guest blogger to my blog today. Poppy Welsh is a final year student at Newcastle University and in this blog she explains how she helped organize a brilliant Giving Voice Harlem Shake...

Hello, I’m Poppy, and in this blog I’d like to tell you how Sophie Herbert, my housemate and fellow SLT student,  and I, created the first Giving Voice Harlem Shake which has so far been viewed by over 3,700 people.

In February 2013 we had an inspirational talk from RCSLT about applying for jobs and encouraging us to participate in the Giving Voice campaign. We were inspired by the success students at other universities had experienced for the campaign - most of all Queen Margaret University  who have achieved an impressive 10,000+ views for their Call Me Maybe parody using AAC – and wanted to organise something ourselves!

The Newcastle students put our heads together and started to think about what we could do. At the same time, cyber space was being bombarded with videos of various renditions of the “Harlem Shake”; a somewhat mysterious song which, like many internet phenomena appeared to come out of nowhere! I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for Newcastle students to ‘Give Voice’.

With most Harlem Shakes only 30 seconds long it seemed perfect for a flashmob-type way of raising awareness of the campaign.

King George VI Building, Newcastle University

There was a great response from Newcastle students about this idea and we really wanted to get it done as soon as possible: mostly while the Harlem Shake was still on trend, but there was the additional factor of wanting to create a Giving Voice Harlem Shake before another university beat us to it! So we made a facebook event, booked a lecture theatre within the appropriately named King George VI building where Speech and Language Therapy is based, and encouraged SLT students to take part. We asked people to bring as many items of fancy dress items as possible (preferably pink, the Giving Voice colour), and also to make Giving Voice style speech bubbles with short SLT-related words or phrases which would show up on the video. We also informed all the staff in the department of what we were doing, and invited them along.

The day itself went really well; although Sophie and I carrying a Space Hopper and loads of posters/speech bubbles down a busy main road was interesting! Plenty of students turned up and many students had put a lot of effort into their fancy dress and speech bubbles. Some of the words included on the speech bubbles were “PECS”, “STROKE”, “NEONATAL”, “AAC” and many more.

The idea behind the Harlem Shake is pretty simple. The “original” dancer must be wearing some sort of mask (so as a keen scuba diver, I donned my wetsuit, fins, mask and snorkel!) and should dance completely alone and ignored for the first section of the video. During this time, the other students were sat at the desks reading books (including dysphagia, aphasia, and phonetics) and copies of the Bulletin. The filming was then stopped and all the other students got changed into their fancy dress. When filming restarted, everyone danced and waved their speech bubbles around. We had some great costumes, including a pirate, an 80s raver, and Sophie the space-hopping golfer! It took a couple of goes before we had the perfect video, but in the end we were all very pleased with the final result.

Luckily I have fairly good editing skills and Sophie and I had our video edited, captioned and published on YouTube less than two hours after filming.  We decided to keep the video as short a possible hoping it would have a greater impact when viewed, so referred people to www.givingvoiceuk.org if they wanted to find out more. But creating the video was the easy part; the biggest challenge was ensuring the video was seen by as many people as possible to raise awareness of the campaign.

 We shared the video in a number of different ways. All Newcastle SLT students (not just those who participated) were asked to share the video with their families, friends, colleagues, Clinical Educators (past and present), and as many other people they could think of.  We also shared the video on facebook and twitter including Newcastle University facebook groups; as well as SLT-related companies and charities who we are very grateful to for sharing the video. We then watched as the view count quickly grew from 0 to 1000 just a few hours after publishing, getting excited every time the view count hit another milestone!

We also informed RCSLT of our video and we were very proud when they chose to show it as part of the “What’s next for your campaign?” talk by Ele Buckley and Emma Barnes at the 2013 National Student Day: it wasn’t easy resisting dancing around in the lecture theatre as we had done in the video!

It was difficult not to feel competitive when other universities created Giving Voice Harlem Shake videos. But what was easy to remember was the whole point of the video: to raise awareness of Giving Voice. In total, all the Giving Voice Harlem Shakes have had almost 8,000 views (with Newcastle’s version accounting for over 40% of these!), and we’re proud that we have been able to have some sort of impact on the campaign. We hope that Newcastle University Speech and Language Sciences students continue to have and enjoy active involvement in the campaign.

Our advice for other students hoping to raise awareness in a similar way is don’t be shy, be imaginative, and make the most of social media to publicise what you have done. But most of all (as with every other aspect of Speech and Language Therapy!), teamwork is essential! We couldn’t have made the video, let alone reached 3,700+ views without the help of all the students who participated.

Hope you enjoyed reading, if you haven’t already, please watch and share our video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YcN-E_0bg

Poppy Welsh (on behalf of all the Newcastle University SLT Harlem Shakers!)

Well done Newcastle (and all the other students who have created a Harlem Shake video to promote Giving Voice!)

Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives

Scary yet exciting!

On Wednesday afternoon  I received a phone call from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists asking if I would be able to/would like to go on BBC Radio Newcastle the following morning as they had asked for an SLT to talk about what we do (as the OT and SLT services in County Durham and Darlington are going out to tender).

I was excited and nervous about the idea of talking on live radio but I always welcome new experiences to talk about speech and language therapy. The main disadvantage was having to be in Newcastle for 6.45am and thus out of my lovely warm bed at 5.30am (a time of day I never usually see!)

RCSLT were extremely supportive over the phone on Wednesday and I felt equipped to go on air and talk about how Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives.

On Wednesday evening I received a phone call from the radio station to have a chat about what would be talked about on the show and where I needed to go etc. The lady also recorded a short interview to use in the news bulletin before my interview (which I heard in the car on the way to the studio yesterday morning!)

I left the house early, with very little voice (having had a cold all week) and kept my fingers crossed it would return by the time I was live on air. Upon arrival I signed in, got my visitors pass and was taken along to the studio where I waited to be called in. I was excited and nervous but everyone was really friendly and I was chatting to another guest speaker who was going to be on about something else, after me. I drank lots of water to keep my throat hydrated and tried not to talk too much before going live.

When I went into the studio, I sat down and was handed headphones and told how close I needed to be to the microphone. I was a bit nervous once I was in the room and tried to concentrate on talking to the presenter (Charlie) rather than think about the fact I was on live radio. I feel the interview went well, but as always with hindsight, there was a lot more specific things I could have said and I have a bruise on my leg now from where I kicked myself after the interview(!!)... Concentrating on the position of my mouth from the mic, balancing my headphones, controlling my speed of talking (something which is usually MUCH too fast!), trying not to concentrate on my tickly throat AND thinking about what I wanted to say and the best way to say it proved to be quite a challenge!

As always when I am put in a different communicative situation I realise just how much I take my own communication for granted every single day. Being on the radio was an exciting experience and certainly something I would do again but I don’t think being a radio presenter will ever be a second job for me (the professionals make it sound so easy!)

Before I left I gave Alfie and Charlie each a Giving Voice pen and they said I’d be welcome back again (so hopefully there might be opportunity for this in the future)!

All in all an interesting experience, listen here from 1 hour 7 minutes if you want to hear the interview (please forgive my hoarse voice!)

Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives!

Aphasiafest

On Saturday evening I went along to Aphasiafest at The Cluny 2, Newcastle  to raise awareness of Giving Voice. Aphasiafest was a night’s entertainment to raise money for the North East Trust for Aphasia (NETA).

NETA is an independent registered charity which is self funded. Aphasia often arises after stroke or other brain trauma and it means difficulties with communication (speaking, understanding, reading, writing). Aphasia has a sudden and profound effect on the person, their family and friends. It impacts on the individual’s confidence, personal relationships, employment and social life. NETA supports people who have Aphasia in the North East, and their families as well as raising awareness of Aphasia. To find out more visit www.neta.org.uk

We set off in plenty time as I’ve never been to the venue before and I am known for my poor sense of direction! I had the satnav and found the venue with no problems (well, ok! That was a tiny white lie – we arrived, on time, with just a couple of wrong turns!)

Upon arrival we were greeted by a number of friendly faces and I was told where I could put the pop up banner. We displayed it near the doorway so that people could see it on arrival. I handed out leaflets and pens and left some on each of the tables for people to read and take away. I also left some leaflets with the lady selling raffle tickets, for people to pick up as they came in.

I love talking about Giving Voice and Speech and Language Therapy and welcome opportunities to do this to audiences. I was quite excited for my little speech on Saturday night and the nerves didn’t really kick in until I got up on stage. I could feel the butterflies in my stomach, but I was determined to have them fly in formation! It doesn’t matter how many times I get up to talk in front of an audience, I still get nervous before I start to talk. I always practise what I am going to say, several times, before I give a talk, to ensure I am well prepared. However, the addition of an audience changes the whole situation and I am suddenly aware of how I am communicating. People tell me that I talk really fast, so I am always aware of this when talking in front of an audience, to ensure that I deliver the talk effectively. Making a speech, however short, always reminds me that I take my own communication skills for granted every day, and that for people with communication difficulties, day-to-day situations might feel this stressful on a regular basis.

I spoke for a couple of minutes about Giving Voice and Speech and Language Therapy, as well as some key facts about Aphasia and NETA. The audience were lovely and I think the little speech went down quite well :-)

I encouraged people to take the leaflets away with them and to pass them on to someone else to spread the message that little bit further.

There was a variety of great entertainers on the night, as well as a raffle, to raise vital funds for the valuable work of NETA. I had an enjoyable evening on Saturday and hope everyone else did too, whilst raising awareness  and valuable funds for a brilliant cause!

Speech and Language Therapy Transforms Lives

~ Thanks to everyone who reads my blog, I'm delighted it has exceeded 10,000 views! ~