A much-loved mentor- Cat Andrew

This drawing shows my first impression of Vietnam!

We want to share the work in speech pathology being done in Vietnam and let the community know about our Beyond Border Mentoring Program 2024. In her words, Cat shares her journey as a speech pathologist and how she got involved in speech and language therapy in Vietnam!

I came to speech and language therapy later in life. After I had my son, the local health visitors were offering free baby massage classes. They told me that this was because there was a very high rate of communication difficulties in children in that area of London, and that this was a way of promoting parent-child interaction. This got me intrigued…I then volunteered for the Stroke Association UK in a communication group, and befriended a stroke survivor with very severe aphasia. He had been a musician - the only man in an all-girl rock band, and ran a music studio. We became great friends and I learned a huge amount about the impact of stroke and communication difficulties and how to communicate with someone without speech. Sadly, he passed away, but I am still good friends with his daughter.

After training at City University London, despite originally wanting to work in adult neuro rehab, I ended up being offered a job by my college tutor in mainstream schools, and as my children were young and it was a term time only post, I accepted and became a paediatric therapist. I love it, and also run drawing and art classes for adults with aphasia and dementia and other neuro conditions, so get a bit of both worlds.

One of my colleagues married a Japanese man and went to live in Japan. She was interviewed for a blog about British therapists working abroad, which had links to organisations for those interested in volunteering abroad, which is how I came across TRINH. I volunteered for the Beyond Borders programme for four years before the opportunity came up to go to Vietnam to supervise a clinical placement for the first master’s cohort at An Binh Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. On my first day, a ‘get-to-know-you meeting’ turned out to be a full presentation ceremony with the entire board of the hospital and a banner welcoming me as an expert! No pressure!

My time in Vietnam was incredible - the students were all super-experienced physiotherapists and doctors, so already highly motivated and knowledgeable. Many of them are already becoming leaders of the profession in Vietnam. I spent some time getting to know the country, including a 22-hour train journey to Huế, which was beautiful and magical, if not always massively comfortable!

From knowing barely anything about Vietnam, I now feel like my second home. I am continuing to volunteer for the Beyond Borders programme with another lovely pair of mentees, and am looking forward to taking my youngest son (age 19) with me this summer to meet my Vietnamese family. He has never been on a motorbike, so he’s in for a treat. I will be running some workshops at An Binh Hospital for parents of children with communication difficulties, and visiting the art group for people with aphasia run by Dr. Dien, which has run in parallel with the one I run for the past ten years.

My hopes for speech and language therapy for the future are already being realised - the passionate and committed therapists of the country are building up their knowledge, experience and professional networks so that foreign therapists are becoming colleagues rather than mentors. Much work is being done on developing Vietnamese tools for assessment as well as knowledge of phonetic and linguistic structures of the languages and dialects in order to understand communication needs in a uniquely Vietnamese context. I am absolutely honoured to have been a very small part of this journey.

Dr. Dien and Ms Cat Andrew at An Binh hospital