My experience as a Speech and Language Therapy Legacy Practitioner 

Highly Specialist SLT, Kirsty Cross, shares her experience working as a Senior Legacy Practitioner and how her role supports SLTs during the early stages of their careers. She discusses the establishment of a legacy practitioner programme and its impact.

 

As SLTs, we can make a real difference to people’s lives, and the profession can offer an exciting and rewarding career. However, the SLT workforce is recognised as being under pressure, with 55% of SLTs who responded to an RCSLT survey reporting a recent experience of burnout (RCSLT, 2025). Recent data shows that 13% of new SLTs leave the HCPC practice register within the first four years (HCPC, 2025), highlighting that the early career stage may be a particularly vulnerable time.

 

What are legacy practitioners?

Legacy practitioners are experienced clinicians often in later stages of their career, who provide coaching, mentoring and pastoral support to people who are at the start of their careers or who are newly appointed into the NHS. The initiative started with nursing and midwifery and is being extended to allied health professionals. Legacy practitioners provide essential professional advice, education and guidance, passing on a ‘legacy’ to the next generation. They play a crucial role in supporting staff health and wellbeing and career progression.

Starting well in a new role, position or organisation can have a significant impact on wellbeing and retention, and appointing Legacy Practitioners may offer an invaluable contribution to helping colleagues to start well and stay well. 

In 2024, the Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board created an innovative project to mitigate some workforce challenges, by establishing two SLT Legacy Practitioner roles with responsibility across three community NHS organisations. While legacy roles have been successfully established in nursing (Hardy, 2023), this was an innovative opportunity for the speech and language therapy profession.

 

Establishing the programme

I have been an SLT since 1998 and have a passion for developing practice education, so I grabbed the opportunity to become an SLT Legacy Practitioner! I joined Karen Blackmore, also a Highly Specialist SLT, to collaboratively establish legacy practice. Our combined NHS experience spanned almost 60 years.

We devised a flexible and responsive programme, developed through coproduction with clinical leads and recent starters, inspiring leadership and clinical skills. Activities, tailored to individuals and organisational needs, include individual welcome resources, Band 5 buddies, Action Learning Sets, CPD opportunities, virtual tea breaks, student employability sessions, and career development conversations.

Legacy practice has promoted innovative training opportunities, ensuring better patient outcomes, particularly in areas like dysphagia (swallowing difficulties), benefiting service users with timely interventions.

We try to be responsive and offer bespoke training to bridge theory-practice gap, nurture sense of belonging – so we include some focus wellbeing focus at every session too.

We targeted recently qualified therapists, apprentices and pre-registration students. Between June 2024 to December 2025 we worked with 35 pre-registration students, four SLT apprentices and 15 NQPs. Since our Legacy Practitioner roles were established, 100% of new starters have continued to work in NHS services, with a number progressing to B6 development roles. This contrasts with local data for the two years prior to legacy practice, where 20-30% of new staff did not complete 12 months in their first post. Professor Gillian Janes from Anglia Ruskin University has carried out an evaluation of the project, with a clear recommendation that legacy practitioner roles become substantive posts.

 

Personal reflections

I love being a legacy practitioner. It has reinvigorated my career, and it has been a privilege to contribute to this project, and I am grateful to the many amazing people across the region and beyond who have lent their encouragement to its success. I have a degree of uncertainty, as the post is currently for a fixed term. But I remain hopeful, because every innovation will encounter challenges, and good ideas with a solid evidence base deserve to be heard. My final reflections are how proud I felt to hear a colleague describe the impact as of the legacy project as “transformative”, and another express that “I don’t want to work anywhere without legacy practice”.

Work on the Eastern Partnership for Innovations in Integrated Care (EPIIC) Community Academy Programme.

Read the full Legacy Practitioner Extension Programme report (PDF).

 

RCSLT’s workforce, education and training programme