For Kate Beckett, a little girl joyously racing out of her office shouting “bubbles”, leaving her mum in tears of joy after finally mastering speech difficulties, is what makes her job as a speech and language therapist so worthwhile.

“When it works well for the child, and that moment you see the penny drop, and they come out with a new word – it’s like nothing else,” she explains. “They are just thrilled with themselves.”

Kate also takes great joy in the relief she can give worried parents too. “Your children are the most precious thing in the world and all you want to do is be able to help them, so I love being able to educate parents on how they can do that.”

Read more: Dublin man had to retire early to care for his profoundly disabled daughter

Kate, who recently opened her own private practice Optima Speech Therapy in Wicklow, originally studied to become a nurse, however a placement on an ENT (ear, nose and throat) ward during her degree changed all that. “I was fascinated from that day on, so after completing my degree and travelling I decided to return and do my Master’s in Speech and Language Therapy,” she reveals.

It was a busy time for Kate whose daughter was just four months old when she began studying again.

“It was very interesting as while I was in college my daughter was going through the same stages we were studying, so I had a live model! But it was definitely a juggling act of course,” she concedes.

However, it was a move that Kate has never regretted for a second. “I loved it from the get-go,” she enthuses. “The industry covers such a broad spectrum that you could work with children, adults, babies in neonatal, or you could be in surgery when there are brain operations going on [with the speech centre]. Then you also have chronic illness, community work and working in hospitals. I have worked in New Zealand and the UK also. So it’s a very broad job with so many opportunities to find your niche.”

Long waiting lists

For Kate that niche was in paediatrics, an area that is incredibly rewarding day in, day out. “We do a lot of work through play therapy and seeing kids suddenly grasp it and go running out to show their parents is so wonderful,” she says.

However, the industry is not without its challenges – there are huge issues with waiting times and backlogs in preventing families from accessing speech and language therapy as quickly as they need, with Kate revealing that public waiting lists can currently stretch up to two years in parts of the country.

“There aren’t enough speech therapists in Ireland,” she admits. “I know from experience dealing with the HSE clinicians that they are just inundated, they have such long waiting lists. They are really doing their best, but there just aren’t enough therapists and not enough experienced therapists either. There are a lot of new courses opening up now which is great but you have to have supervision when you’re a new graduate so that then takes away people from clients too, as they are trying to train up the newly-qualified therapists.”

Kate explains that like other specialist areas, she constantly gets asked for advice when people find out what she does, but she doesn’t mind in the slightest. “I’m always happy to chat and help if I can, I know it can be such a worrying time for parents,” she says.

However, with many private clinics also being forced to close their books to new clients, she acknowledges it is a problem she will also face. “Right now, since opening my own practice, I only have to answer to myself in terms of how my waiting lists are run, but already there’s a lot of people coming in so it’s definitely something I will have to manage in terms of how many clients I can actually take on so I can give them my best,” she continues.

Dealing with frustrated parents who have been waiting a long time to access help is par for the course in her day-to-day, but Kate says she understands entirely as “it comes from a place of anxiety for their child and wanting to get them help”.

Advice for Worried Parents

For parents who are worried about their child’s speech, Kate’s advice is to act as quickly as possible.

She adds: “Waiting lists will vary depending where you are in the country and population density, but public wait lists can be up to two years and a lot of private lists are closed.

“So, really, as soon as you notice an issue you need to get onto the waiting list. Some children do catch up on their own, and so the ‘wait and see’ approach will work for those children, they are just a little slower than their peers, but we can’t tell that from the outset, so raise your concerns and get on the list as soon as possible.

“You can always cancel if you need to but it’s better to be on that list and moving along than waiting until it becomes obvious that your child will definitely need help.”

However, Kate does add that there is a huge range of normal development, so don’t be a slave to your child hitting milestones by a certain age. “We always consider a few months on either side within a normal range,” she says.

And for many children the issue is frequently not speech at all, but rather their hearing – something parents are often surprised by.

“We always get a hearing test before even considering speech therapy,” Kate tells RSVP. “The way I describe it to my mums and dads is that there are loud sounds in speech and quiet sounds. If hearing is impaired in any way and that may have happened just from frequent colds, children can miss the quieter sounds in speech so they don’t learn it. And then they don’t use it, which is when we see a late talker, so hearing is always the first thing to be checked.

“Parents often dismiss that because they know their child hears and responds to certain things so they think that means there is no issue full stop.”

Positive step forward

For Kate, she would love to see Ireland making better use of speech and language assistants. “I saw it first-hand when working in New Zealand and it’s a model that works very well,” she continues.

“The therapist does the assessment and makes the plan, however it is the assistants then who implement the programme with the patients. There are new courses opening up for this in Ireland and that’s a really positive move.

“It will free up more therapists to address waiting lists, but it also gives people a great insight into the industry and an entry point. Then they can progress on to the degree or master’s if they want to. ” One of the biggest challenges in Kate’s day-to-day is running her own business. “I’m a master of everything at the moment,” she admits.

“The actual speech and language part is what I enjoy but now I also have to think about running a website, metadata and keyword research and all those sorts of things, as well as accounts.”

Her saviour has been joining Acorns, a women’s business networking support group, something she highly urges other entrepreneurs to do. “It’s quite lonely doing it all on your own especially if you’ve never worked for yourself before,” she says.

“To be able to reach out to someone for advice and just to have people

who might know a great accountant or who can say I had that experience with this too. The training courses and Whatsapp groups are so helpful also, to have that support network is definitely something I would recommend.”

Improving Accessibility

However, according to Kate, once you’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, it’s hard to stop. “It’s a steep learning curve but once I released that side of me it sparked more,” she continues.

“My book is due to be published in September this year with Speechmark Publishers and is called Ultimate Speech Sounds: Eliciting Sounds Using 3D Animation.”

She also has a YouTube channel that teaches children to talk with the help of a 3D avatar called Dara as well as developing online speech and language therapy resources called Resourceible that will compliment her book coming out in September.

Kate adds: “Once you start working for yourself you see all the possibilities and then it becomes a problem of holding it all back. I suppose the drive behind it all is that I just wanted speech and language therapy to be more accessible in Ireland, and I hope that I’m helping to do that.”

For more information on Kate’s free resources visit www.resourceible.com or to book a consultation visit www.optimaspeechtherapy.com

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