A Clare father whose son has additional needs is raising serious concerns for his education due to a severe shortage of speech and language therapists.
7 year-old Jack O’Loughlin from Ennis who has autism had been linked with the Clare Early Intervention Services since he was 2, but in the last twelve months has been unable to access speech and language training due to staff deficits.
Jack’s family also made presentations to Enable Ireland, but were informed he couldn’t avail of one to one support and the organisation were unable to provide group services, again due to personnel shortages.
His father Kieran O’Loughlin is calling on the Government to urgently increase funding for special education services to prevent more children from falling behind.
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“We are unable to comment on individual cases when to do so might reveal information in relation to identifiable individuals, breaching the ethical requirement on us to observe our duty of confidentiality.
The Clare Children’s Disability Network continue to monitor waiting times for children and try to minimise these as much as possible, while advocating for additional resources to meet demands on the service.
Mid West Community Healthcare currently has 86% of approved posts filled in the Children’s Disability Network Teams. A number of current vacant clinical posts are going through the recruitment process.
Specifically in relation to Clare, there are currently 1.6 WTE (whole-time equivalent) speech and language therapists in post to cater to the needs of children up to nine years of age. An additional 1.0 WTE senior SLT has recently accepted an offer to take up a post to work with this age group in Clare.”
