Rosanna Gray knew her daughter Shara was delayed in speech, but it wasn't until she was a bit older that the worried mum and her husband started looking for speech therapists.
Shara, 5, has a condition called childhood apraxia of speech, which is when the part of the brain responsible for translating messages to the mouth doesn't work as it should.
This results in Shara knowing what she wants to say, but her brain not being able to tell her mouth muscles how to move to make the sounds.
"If she speaks simple sentences you can understand her fine, [however,] the more she talks, the harder she gets to understand," Ms Gray said.
After being stuck for months on a waiting list to see a local specialist, Shara was finally allocated a speech therapist in Hobart.
However, after just three months of regular sessions that saw Shara improve, the speech therapist moved interstate, meaning her parents were back to square one.
"We actually haven't been able to get someone since," Ms Gray said.
Ms Gray said she's been able to source a speech pathologist in Sydney but that means sessions have to take place through Telehealth.
"it is not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Speech therapy does work with Telehealth but obviously [it's] a lot harder.
From next month, as part of the Allied Health Expansion Program at the University of Tasmania, speech pathology will be offered for the first time in the state.
Professor Anne Whitworth — who has 30 years of experience in the field — said she's excited to lead the course.
"It's been a long time in the making. Everyone has had to go interstate [to study] and Tasmania has also relied on a trickle of people coming here from other states.
"We've always had problems recruiting … and retaining people."
The course, which kicks off in July, will have an emphasis on providing rural and regional education.
Professor Whitworth said this might help in the long run with the state's crippling staff shortages.
"We will be encouraging students to go to those settings," she said.
Through a combination of online and face-to-face learning, Professor Whitworth said, the course was set up to "grow the Tasmanian workforce and to suit the Tasmanian people".
Kathryn Fordyce, a director at Speech Pathology Australia — the peak body for practitioners — said she hoped the introduction of the course would target Tasmania's problem of recruiting and retaining therapists.
"I have lived in Tasmania for 10 years and, for me, it has been really obvious that one of the challenges in relation to recruitment has been the absence of a course in the state," she said.
"We've seen young people who might've been interested in doing speech pathology having to move to the mainland to train.
"Others who haven't had the capacity to move to the mainland may choose other similar professions — nursing or teaching — something they could do locally and so we were really missing out on people who would make really great speech pathologists."
And while Ms Fordyce was excited to finally see options available to locals, she said the workforce shortage was a broader problem that would not be fixed immediately.
"One of the most significant concerns — and I'm sure that the university has got this in hand — is in relation to those rural placement opportunities.
"When [practitioners] take on a student in a clinical placement opportunity, it requires quite a lot of time commitment in terms of nurturing, giving feedback and giving support to those students.
"So, making sure that there are sufficient placements available for the students, both those [who] are studying at UTAS but also those [who] have been studying remotely."
Ms Fordyce said she'd love to see the Tasmanian government offer some kind of payment or incentive to clinical placement venues, which would allow them to support student placements.
She said the financial assistance would be a long-term investment in the future of the profession and would alleviate immediate pressures for speech pathologists.
"In the longer term, [the course] will address some of the workforce issues as the more speech pathologists we train the better, but it certainly doesn't address the immediate shortfall that we have in relation to there not being sufficient speech pathologists right now."
