MEET NICHOLA
Nichola Briggs
Senior Speech Pathologist · MSc (Speech and Language Sciences), CPSP, MSPA
Over ten years of specialist experience across acute, subacute and community settings, including senior clinical leadership at Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Nichola has over ten years of experience working with speech, language, swallowing, and voice disorders. She graduated from University College London (UCL) and completed her award-winning Master’s research (Preliminary evidence for modality specific attention impairment in post-stroke aphasia, 2015), which sought to understand deficits in language and cognition post-stroke.Â
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Nichola began her career in the UK’s National Health Service, working across a number of key teaching hospitals in London, and specialising in the field of acquired neurological impairments. Given the life-long disabilities often associated with neurological injury, Nichola has a passion for providing specialist, quality intervention across the continuum of care – from intensive treatment centres to home-based, community settings.Â
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In 2019 Nichola moved to Melbourne and continued to specialise her practice in early intervention post acquired brain injury (ABI), including a senior clinical role within the trauma service at Royal Melbourne Hospital. She now works privately and in the NDIS space, bringing tertiary hospital-level expertise directly into community and disability settings.
With a keen interest working across both acute and subacute settings, Nichola also works privately and in the NDIS space with aged-care and general rehab populations, alongside progressive and non-progressive neurological conditions.
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Nichola is a strong advocate for providing evidence-based intervention. Outside of clinical practice she has worked on a number of large clinical studies, including the Australian Imaging, Biomarker & Lifestyle (AIBL) study of ageing, which aims to understand the natural history of Alzheimer’s disease progression and is the largest of its kind in Australia; and UCL's Predicting Language Outcomes and Recovery After a Stroke (PLORAS) study, which aims to tell future stroke survivors how much language they are likely to regain and how long this is likely to take.
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Nichola also independently pursues her own research interests in prolonged disorders of consciousness (DoC), and will complete her PhD on prognostication and outcome prediction for patients in a DoC following severe ABI, with application to a clinical setting.
Tavistock Trust for Aphasia Prize winner, awarded in recognition of excellence for work relating to aphasia.
Member, Speech Pathology Australia · Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP)
Published in Brain Impairment journal:Â A formalised process for decannulation reduced number of days with tracheostomy for people with an acquired brain injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis.