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Current State of the Nation

If you are living in Ireland, you do not need Release to tell you about the huge demand for speech and language services. However, the March 2001 Supply and Demand for Therapy Healthcare Professionals Report, by Peter Bacon & Associates found that over 372 additional Speech and Language Therapists are urgently needed to meet the current demand in Ireland and the report forecasts that this gap will widen to 985 by 2015.

Due to the substantial number of unfilled Speech and Language Therapist vacancies in the public health system, voluntary bodies and school systems, thousands of Irish children are not receiving the speech therapy they desperately need in order to improve their integration into mainstream society.

And things are not getting better...

Among other things, The Disability Act of 2005 provides for an assessment of need for people with disabilities, and allows for children who need early intervention to be covered by the assessment of needs provisions.

Although this is what we needed the government to recognise, there still is no fundamental structure to complete the assessments in a timely manner and even more important, there is no structure to give continuous accessible therapy which naturally follows such assessments.

Release Speech Therapy is a low cost, available resource which has been proven to work in both public and private sectors.

There simply is no excuse for Irish children to only get an average of eight hours of therapy per year any longer.

In addition, the People with Special Educational Needs Act formally established The National Council for Special Education (NCSE) on 1 October 2005. The NCSE must provide for the full implementation of the act by October 2010.

The Act provides that if parents consider their child may have special educational needs they may ask the health board (if the child is not at school) or the NCSE to have an assessment completed. The health board or NCSE must have the assessment started within one month of this request. They can refuse if they feel there are no grounds to complete the assessment, or a similar assessment was completed within 12 months.

The Act states:

• the health board must make available to the non school-going child the services which are identified as necessary by the assessment and
• the NCSE must make these available to the school-going child.

The NCSE must also provide the services identified in the education plan.

Release Speech Therapy is in the position to provide speech and language assessments and continuous speech and language therapy (up to 45 hours per year per child), and is an answer to the implementation issues which will arise.

For more information on the above legislation please visit:

www.namhi.ie
www.comhairle.ie
www.assistireland.ie
www.nda.ie