Up to 300 new therapists could be working to reduce the growing wating lists for speech and language therapy within months.

The Minister of State at the Department of Children Anne Rabbitte said the therapists could be in place by May.

It comes after it emerged that around 25,000 children are waiting on an initial assessment or initial appointment for speech and language therapy.

Around 8,000 of these are waiting longer than one year.

A further 18,500 are awaiting further therapy with more than 6,000 waiting longer than one year.

On The Hard Shoulder this evening, Deputy Rabbitte said the waiting lists are “unacceptable.”

“That is not early intervention by any manner of means,” she said. “That is nearly wilful neglect by the State and I actually have to put a system in place to address that.”

She said the system needs around 400 new therapists – and funding is in place for 200 of them.

“This year we got funding for 100 therapists posts and the school inclusion model got 100 therapists posts,” she said.

“So, we achieved 50% of that ask and I am already making budgetary preparations for next October when we will have another ask for what needs to go in place.”

Therapists

She said a further 100 therapists were hired before the coronavirus pandemic; however, they have yet to make a real impact on the backlog as they were redirected to contact tracing and testing during the first wave.

“This is before I became a minister of state and they never really got to go into posts,” she said.

“They went into contact tracing and swabbing and they only started to come back out of that last October – we acknowledge that.

“Now we are recruiting another 100 on top of that, along with the school inclusion model team so there are going to be 300 therapists going into post by May.

“They will actually make a direct impact and we have to give that an opportunity.”

She said the new network disability teams now need to be given an opportunity to deliver and reduce the lists.

"Just shameful"

On the show yesterday, campaigners rejected the HSEs claim that the rising waiting lists were linked to the coronavirus.

The Interim CEO of Inclusion Ireland, Lorraine Dempsey said the virus may have compounded the problem; however, the waiting lists were her long before the virus arrived.

She said it “just shameful” to see the list getting longer rather than shorter and insisted, “COVID is a minor part in that.”

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