Rachel Levine

Background

About Rachel Levine

I am a speech pathologist with six years' clinical experience across a variety of diverse settings in the public sector. I have always held a passion for providing rehabilitative care to adults with acquired injury, particularly neurological injury. As a new graduate in 2016, I was eager to push myself outside my comfort zone and experience a career I had never considered. As such, I commenced my career as a speech pathologist in Education supporting children to access the curriculum using a whole-school approach. Whilst I really valued the two years I spent in education, I couldn't ignore my heart which was telling me my passion was not in paediatric speech pathology. I commenced my career in adult populations at Ipswich Hospital in 2018 within a generalist role. Throughout the three years I was employed at Ipswich Hospital I worked in a number of challenging roles across multiple caseloads including general medicine, stroke (acute and rehabilitation), general rehabilitation, orthopedics, geriatric care, general surgery, palliative care, head and neck cancer and laryngectomy. I gained experience in part-time senior clinical roles as a project officer implementing a patient-centred approach to head and neck cancer management and in a job share capacity as senior rehabilitation speech pathologist. I was successfully appointed to a rehabilitation speech pathologist role at the Surgical, Treatment and Rehabilitation Service (STARS) in January 2021, Queensland Health's new sub-acute surgical and rehabilitation hospital, as part of their initial recruitment round and have been working there since providing primarily inpatient stroke and brain injury rehabilitation as well as geriatric care. As well as providing rehabilitative care for acquired neurological disorders, a passion of mine is supporting clinicians and services to implement research evidence into practice in order to provide high-quality, patient-centred and innovative practices that reduce the provision of low-value care. As such, I commenced my PhD at the University of Queensland in July 2021 (whilst maintaining a part-time role at STARS) which investigates the clinical implementation of an evidence-based rehabilitation program for the treatment of post-stroke aphasia.