Update on the Gateshead SLT Petition
- Guest Writer
- Jul 16
- 1 min read
In May, the Movers & Shakers took part in an urgent campaign in Gateshead to save its specialist speech and language therapy service.
For two years, until December 2025, PUK had funded a post at Gateshead that provided SLT assessments for people with Parkinson’s. And it reduced waiting times for a swallow assessment from 6 days to 32 hours for people in hospital, and from 6 weeks to 5 days for people not in hospital.
We thought the trust would fund this post permanently (in alignment with a long-standing model in which charities fund NHS roles on the understanding that trusts will continue them once initial funding ends) but they made the decision to close it. Since the service stopped running at the end of 2025, waiting times are already rising.
A petition was then launched earlier this year calling on the Trust to reverse the decision but they have since decided not to do so, and for the time being, there is no Parkinson's specialist SLT service in Gateshead. They have, however, made several commitments to improve the broader speech and language therapy services for all patients.
Local Campaigns Officer for the North East & Yorkshire PUK branch, Mattie Shannon gives an update in the clip below:
To find out more about Parkinson's UK campaigns, or to get in touch with them, visit https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/get-involved/campaign/our-campaigns
