Build the resources to help children with speech

Imagine your daughter says her first word later than her friends do. You wait, hoping she will catch up. By age three, she still is not putting words together the way other kids her age are. Your doctor refers you to a speech-language pathologist. You expect a call within a few weeks.

Instead, you wait. Six months. A year. Two years.

By the time your daughter is finally seen, she is heading into kindergarten. She still struggles to tell her teacher she needs the bathroom. She still cannot explain when something hurts. She still cannot join in the games her classmates play, because those games need more words than she has.

As a parent, your anxiety grows, the frustration leading to sleepless nights worrying about how your child’s life will be impacted by this lack of support. The rest of your family and circle of friends is deeply affected by this potential crisis, they can see you struggling, you feel the stain of stigma attaching itself to your precious daughter. Where can you turn to help your child?

This is not a hypothetical. It is the current reality for thousands of Manitoba families, created by our province’s severe shortage of speech-language pathologists (SLPs).

Manitoba is the only province in Western Canada without its own graduate program to train SLPs. In many of the province’s health regions, SLP positions sit vacant, and outpatient wait times stretch to four years and beyond. In school divisions, it is common for one SLP to serve more than 100 students who need support — a caseload that makes early intervention nearly impossible, even though early intervention produces the best outcomes.

SLPs do far more than help children learn to talk. They support Manitobans of every age: children learning language and those learning to read, adults and seniors recovering their voices and their ability to swallow safely after a stroke or brain injury, and people with autism, Down syndrome, and other conditions who rely on communication support to fully take part in their communities.

When there are not enough SLPs, all of these Manitobans wait. The mental health concerns of not only the individuals who need help, and their circle of care, but also the therapists who have a never-ending list of cases bleeds over into the health care system that is already drowning as a dysfunctional source of treatment. This compounded health concern is, in its current form, extremely inefficient from every aspect.

Now imagine something different.

Imagine a Manitoba in which a graduate program at the University of Manitoba trains speech-language pathologists here, in our own communities, with an understanding of our rural, northern, and Indigenous populations built into their training from the start.

Imagine those graduates staying in Manitoba after they finish, because they built their clinical placements and their lives here, instead of leaving for one of the provinces that already trains its own SLPs. Imagine a child with a language delay getting help at age three instead of age six, before that delay turns into a reading problem, a behaviour problem, or a reason to fall behind in school. Imagine the improvement in that family’s overall mental health.

The University of Manitoba has already built a complete proposal for a master of speech-language pathology program. What is missing is not a plan. What is missing is political will.

The cost of continuing to wait is not only measured in wait-list numbers. Research consistently connects unidentified language disorders to serious outcomes later in life.

Boys with developmental language disorder are up to four times more likely to engage in delinquent behaviour, and studies of youth in the justice system regularly find that well over half have a language disorder that was never diagnosed, not because it was not there, but because no one was available to catch it. Unidentified language difficulties are also strongly connected to poor mental health, low school engagement, and higher dropout rates.

Every year Manitoba goes without a training program, more of these outcomes become someone’s reality, and the costs are paid by our health care, education and justice systems instead of being prevented through early, effective support.

Saskatchewan recently launched its own SLP graduate program, with plans to prioritize students from within their own province. So even though a program now exists closer to home, Manitoba students will not benefit from it.

Every year we wait, more of the SLPs our province needs choose to study and stay elsewhere.

Manitobans deserve a health-care and education system that catches communication difficulties early, not one that waits years to respond after the difficulty has already affected a child’s schooling, a family’s stress levels, or a senior’s independence. A master of speech-language pathology program at the University of Manitoba can change that, but only if our elected officials hear that this matters to the people who vote for them.

If you have waited for a speech-language pathologist, or watched your child, your parent, or your student wait, contact your MLA.

If you have been lucky enough to be able to not only afford, but find a private SLP to support your family member, but understand that not everyone has that option, contact your MLA.

If you are a concerned citizen who sees the need for this program even though you are not directly affected, please contact your MLA.

If you are a retired SLP therapist and see that the changes you wanted to occur are still on the negotiating table, please contact your MLA.

Ask them where they stand. Ask them to raise this concern with the minister of advanced education and training. Ask them to support collaboration between the Government of Manitoba and the University of Manitoba to move this proposal forward.

Manitoba families have waited long enough. Your actions will be part of the solution that may affect someone you know and care for.

Britney Morrish is a language and literacy educational consultant in Gimli; Bonnie Bricker is a mental health advocate.