Kate Toft

I am part of the pre-registration eating, drinking and swallowing competencies project in the department of speech and hearing sciences. We are working towards developing curriculum content and resources to enable students to meet the new competency requirements for eating, drinking and swallowing recently introduced by the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists. This project involves working closely with our student practice placement providers to include them in the changes and ensure a uniform approach to competency assessment across the QMU placement catchment area. In addition to my QMU post I also work as a Highly Specialist Speech & Language Therapist in the head & neck cancer team in NHS Lothian. I am also currently a Clinical Doctorate candidate at Stirling University, where my thesis topic is a mixed methods investigation of the properties of a patient-reported outcome tool for assessing head and neck cancer dysphagia-related quality of life.