Nabiah Sohail

I’m Nabiah Sohail and I’m Head of Children and Young Peoples Therapies Services in Homerton University Hospital in Hackney.

I manage Children’s Speech and Language Therapy, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy Services, Keyworking and Targeted Health Outreach Team.

My role involves working with the leads of these services to ensure we provide high quality care that meet the needs of children and their families in Hackney.

What I love about my job is listening and learning from all the teams I work with and sharing good practice.  I love hearing the feedback from children and young people and their families.  When they tell you therapy has been life changing and helped them I feel really proud of our service.

My mum worked in Speech and Language Therapy and inspired me to go into Speech and Language Therapy.  I always knew I wanted to work with people and particularly children.  I loved languages and writing so Speech and Language was a great fit for me.  I did the 4 year undergraduate degree in Speech and Language Therapy at City University.  After doing my BSc in Speech and Language Therapy I worked in Speech Forensics for a short while.

I was employed by New Scotland Yard and my role as a Forensic Phonetician was to analyse speech recordings to identify speakers.  It was very interesting being involved in kidnapping and terrorism cases and presenting evidence in court! I then got my first job as a Speech and Language Therapist in Hackney and have been here ever since.  I worked across the age range from 0-25 years with children and young people with various speech, language or communication difficulties.  I then went on to management roles managing the speech and language therapy service before taking on the Head of Therapies role. I also worked at University College London as a Teaching fellow and enjoyed teaching students training to be Speech and Language Therapists.

I love working in Hackney because of the diversity of the community.  I like meeting people from different walks of life who belong to different cultures and speak different languages.   My top tip to anyone considering a career in Speech and Language Therapy is to go and get some experience.  Whether that’s working in a nursery, primary or secondary school or college. Speech and Language Therapy is a great profession and it’s so diverse and helping others to communicate is just such a rewarding and satisfying feeling.  The biggest myth is that speech and language therapists work with children who stammer.  We do….but we do a whole lot more too!