Every Speech and Language Therapist Can Be an Ethical Leader: Revisiting the Language of Ethics (Part 1 of 2)

The aim of the paper is to facilitate speech and language therapists to reclaim agency and demonstrate ethical leadership as they advocate for their clients, services and profession. Building on the language of ethics introduced in the first of these two linked papers (anonymized for peer review with (McAllister et al., 2024)), we apply the language of ethics to two hypothetical scenarios situated in childhood disability services in Ireland; we discuss three levels of ethical leadership: ethical leadership in, ethical leadership of and ethical leadership for. We argue that the use of an ethical approach may be valuable for the speech and language therapist, especially in a context of resource limitations. We hope that use of ethical approaches will facilitate speech and language therapists to embed ethical leadership in everyday practice and that the speech and language therapy community and service providers consider ethics more explicitly in service planning and delivery.