Hi,

Thank you for visiting my page and taking the time to read my story.

I am Kate, I have worked for the NHS for almost 5 years in Children's Speech and Language Therapy in Barnsley. The majority of my work is with children who use AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) to communicate because they have little or no verbal means of communication. This can range from anything from Makaton signing or communication books to using high tech devices such as iPads and computers with personalised programmes on them. Sometimes when I tell people what I do for a job, they have never heard of the term 'AAC' or know what our service can do.

As October is AAC Awareness month, I wanted to challenge myself to use only AAC to communicate both during work and in my free time. I will be doing this on Tuesday 23rd October from 10am - 3pm and 7:30pm - 10pm.

My goal is to ultimately raise awareness (and funding) for our service users and their families.

I feel this is a challenge because I will constantly have to remind myself that I can only communicate this way and I feel it will give me a valuable insight in to the lives of the children I work with, whilst also raising awareness for their difficulties and the challenges that AAC users face in their school, work and daily lives.