Career Focus/Speech therapists: There is a huge shortage of speech and language therapists in the State and an increasing demand for their services, so it's a fairly good bet in terms of job prospects, writes Olivia Kelly.

However, the number of colleges places is very limited. Currently there is only one undergraduate course in the State, the BSc in clinical speech and language studies at Trinity College Dublin.

This course has an intake of just 30 students each year and the points are quite high (settling at 505 in the CAO second round, 2001). However there are plans to create new courses in other colleges and increase the number of places, Margaret Leahy head of the clinical speech and language department in TCD says.

"The Bacon report recommended increasing the number of speech and language therapists to more than 1,000 by 2016 and the Department of Education is looking at increasing the number of places in the very near future. There should be something in the offing by next October."

There's a lot more to speech therapy than teaching children how to say their R's or correcting a stutter. Therapists work with a wide variety of groups of all ages, with a range of different problems, but their main role is to help people communicate.

"It's a career that provides for the management of people with any kind of communication problem," Leahy says. "One major function is to diagnose people who have communication disorders and provide therapy and management strategies to deal with the problem."

Although people of any age can require speech therapy, about 70 per cent of therapists work with children. "Developmental problems are generally associated with children who have not acquired language in the usual way and whose speech is not intelligible." Problems include stammering, cleft lip and pallet and voice disorders. Therapists can also help with problems in the use of language for reading and writing, as in dyslexia and language problems resulting from hearing impairments.

People of all ages can also acquire communication disorders as a result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, motor neuron disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis or head and neck cancers. Apart from communication difficulties, speech therapists also treat swallowing disorders which can accompany may of the illnesses above and can also affect infants. Therapists also treat those with intellectual impairments, assessing and treating their communication difficulties.

Communication, rather than speech, is generally used to refer to the work of the speech and language therapist as not all difficulties involve verbal communication, Leahy explains. "The communication difficulty may not involve speech; the primary problem may be getting the message across and their may be the need for a non-verbal means of communication."

Often this involves the use of computers (like the one used by Stephen Hawking) and other alternative communication devices.

The community care sector is the biggest employer of speech therapists. They practice in a wide variety of settings including hospitals, clinics, special schools and private practice. They also find themselves liaising with a variety of allied professional including doctors, psychologists, physiotherapists, teachers and the parents and families of clients.

An appreciation of language in itself, good communication skills and use of language are a prerequisite for speech therapists, Leahy says. While the TCD course has a strong science element, it also offers practical work from first year onwards. Due to the shortage of therapists, securing employment is generally not a problem and students tend to get sponsorship from employers from third year onwards in return for a work commitment.

However vacant positions cannot be filled solely by TCD graduates. Many Irish speech and language therapists gain their qualification outside the state, says Sallyanne Duncan of the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists. "People can study speech and language therapy in Jordanstown (University of Ulster) and in many UK colleges and they do not have to take any equivalency exams to work here, they just go through a vetting process from the Department of Health, which usually takes four months."