About Me

Asma Khanum, Managing Director of ChatterBug Speech and Language Therapy had a very unique journey into speech therapy which has only fuelled her passion for a better service. Asma qualified as a Speech and Language Therapist in London having trained at UCL. She kick-started her career working for the NHS, progressing from a newly qualified therapist to working within management within three years. In 2008 Asma moved to Yorkshire and returned to working as a therapist within her local NHS Speech and Language service. It was this position that opened her eyes to the increasing need within the service. Asma Recalls "The service that I was working for had lots of children waiting and a large number of recently/newly qualified SLTs who had access to limited support and supervision. Which meant that they were not always able to make quick decisions on patient care, adding to a delay in decision making." It was during this time that Asma herself became a patient of the NHS, as she was both diagnosed with thyroid cancer and discovered she was pregnant in quick succession! The combination of Asma's experience as a professional, a patient and a soon to be parent; really opened her eyes to the needs of the local area. Asma wanted to create a service where children would not have to risk their ability to communicate on the over-exaggerated wait times and poor therapist to patient communication that was evident in the services which were currently available. "I wanted to be able to do something that was going to make a difference for many years after I was gone and it snowballed from there. I registered as an independent practitioner and started seeing private clients, but I wanted more. I wanted it to be bigger, because the need was great. I started to find out a little bit more about myself as an entrepreneur and about setting up a social enterprise and ChatterBug was born."