A five-year-old boy who has been waiting for more than a year for speech and language therapy has been told that even though he is on a priority list, it could be another 12 months before he will be called for therapy.
The delay was highlighted yesterday by Fine Gael TD Seán Barrett, who described it as "appalling and unacceptable".
He had made representations to the Health Service Executive about the boy, Stephen, who was referred for speech and language therapy by the public health nursing service in November 2006.
More than one year later, the therapy still has not started.
In response to Mr Barrett's query, the HSE wrote to him saying: "Following assessment, he was placed on the priority list for speech and language therapy. Stephen will be called for therapy as quickly as possible but this could take up to one year."
Mr Barrett said the situation was "farcical" and the Government was failing to deal with the "massive national backlog" of people requiring such therapy.
"The 2002 Bacon report recommended that the number of speech and language graduates be increased four-fold to 100 annually to cope with the burgeoning waiting lists and the country's acute shortage of therapists," he said.
But while the intake of students had increased significantly, graduates down the line were not able to secure posts as therapists because they did not have enough experience, he claimed.
"How are they supposed to gain the necessary experience unless the health service gives them the opportunity to do so?" he said.
"It literally defies comprehension that we would specifically train additional speech and language therapy students to address a serious waiting list crisis, and then place obstacles in their path that have the effect of paralysing the service."
Mr Barrett called on Minister for Health Mary Harney urgently to address the ongoing waiting list crisis by providing posts for additional therapist graduates "to enable serious inroads to be made on this major problem".
A HSE spokesman said that 68 basic grade speech and language therapy graduates had been placed on a national panel in recent months and many of them had already started work with the HSE.
He pointed out that, on foot of the Bacon recommendations, three additional speech and language therapy schools were established in 2003 in Limerick, Cork and Galway.
The spokesman added that the number of speech and language therapists employed by the HSE had "considerably increased" between 2002 and September 2007 with a 67 per cent increase in whole-time equivalents being recruited.
