Each year on 6th March the European Speech and Language Therapy Association (ESLA) promote a public awareness campaign.
In support of this year’s ESLA theme, our February #ReSNetSLT tweetchat will focus on SLT careers across all clinical groups & work sectors.
This tweetchat is supported by the RCSLT’s ESLA Action Group @UK_ESLA, together with Team @ReSNetSLT.
Throughout 2022, ReSNetSLT is delighted to be working with an enthusiastic group of SLT students: and as you can see on our updated Calendar View, we are already looking forward to them sharing their experiences of dipping a toe into the ‘research environment’ with us.
So, we invite you to read on to see the introduction to the ESLA theme, plus the questions that we have planned to structure our chat.
We invite all students, educators, practitioners and managers to join our conversation – looking forward to reflecting on the influences on our SLT career paths ….
What is ESLA?
The European Speech and Language Association (ESLA) is the umbrella organisation for Speech and Language Therapy Associations across Europe. We currently have 30 organisations in 27 countries representing over 50,000 SLT professionals. ESLA’s strategic objectives are to:
- Be the authoritative voice of speech and language therapy in Europe.
- Increase recognition, promotion and protection of the profession.
- Ensure the sustainability of the organisation.
European Day of Speech and Language Therapy
Every year, on 6th March, SLTs join together to celebrate the European Day of SLT #EuroSLTDay.
The purpose of this day is to raise awareness of communication and swallowing difficulties and to promote the roles of SLTs throughout Europe, celebrating our similarities and differences, to learn from each other, developing our practice and increasing our visibility as a profession.
Each year has a specific theme, focusing on a clinical topic.
Member organisations participate in a poster competition focused on the theme, and the chosen poster can be used to promote the day.
This year the theme is Speech and Language Therapy across the lifespan, which is a wide-ranging topic, allowing us to reflect on our profession and how we may support people from birth through early years, school and adulthood until the end of life.
Raising Visibility
There is an active social media taskforce in ESLA, using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to raise our visibility.
In the UK, the RCSLT ESLA Action group helps disseminate information about ESLA activities to UK SLTs.
Both @ESLA_UK and @ESLAEurope will be holding events around 6th March to help raise awareness of the essential roles SLTs have in supporting people across the lifespan.
If you use Twitter and want to tweet on 6th March to celebrate the day, please use the hashtag: #EuroSLTDay.
If you use Facebook, please like and share posts.
We look forward to seeing all SLT celebrations on 6th March.
ESLA Events
ESLA has been active over the past year hosting a series of webinars focusing on a wide range of clinical topics, and the 11th ESLA congress is taking place this year in May.
The congress theme is ‘New Frontiers in Speech and Language Therapy’, and the programme will be accessible both in the beautiful city of Salzburg in Austria and online.
Our Tweetchat topic = The influences of student clinical placement experiences on SLT careers:
We look forward to hearing everyone’s reflections, insights and advice on experiences of clinical placements: how this may influence confidence, skills and interest to work with certain populations in the future.
In particular, we are very interested to hear experiences of how student placements have changed during COVID.
Other recent developments in student placements have also included leadership placements, public health placements and research placements.
Everyone will have comments to share – experienced practitioners and educators, as well as current students and newly qualified, from many different settings.
Our questions have been developed with students, and this Tweetchat event is being run with some of our student volunteers.
The questions to structure our tweetchat discussions on 23rd February:
1. Please tell us about your personal experience of a clinical placement – as a student or clinical/educator (current/recent/in the past) – and how that influenced your/your student’s knowledge, skills and/or confidence for working in that specific field of practice.
2. What is your experience of innovative non face-to-face placements, e.g., during COVID. How could this type of placement be developed further in future?
3. Please tell us about your experiences – as a student or clinical/educator (current/recent/in the past) – of research and/or EBP conversations with students on their clinical placement
4. What advice would you like to share about student placements and the potential influence on future working careers?