Six-year-old Felix has a knack for making friends wherever he goes.
Outgoing and energetic, he's the type of kid who can strike up a conversation with almost anyone.
That's why his mother, Claudia Wilson, was so disheartened when she realised other people struggled to understand him.
"It was really hard watching him trying to communicate and not being understood," she said.
"I was worried that was going to affect his confidence."
But getting Felix the speech therapy he needed in Canberra wasn't as simple as booking an appointment.
"I first inquired about speech pathology for Felix earlier in the year, only to find that not only was there a waitlist, but the waitlist wasn't even going to open until 2023," Ms Wilson said.
"So even if we were successful, waiting the six months to get on that waitlist, it's impossible to tell if that waitlist was going to be six, 12, 18 months.
"Who knows how much longer it would have been before we would have gotten a diagnostic assessment, and then to start actual therapy."
Pandemic pressures create 'perfect storm'
Canberra has long had a shortage of speech pathologists, but demand for services both in the ACT and across Australia has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speech Pathology Australia president Tim Kittel said, nationally, wait lists for private practices range from "six months to over two years".
"It's been a bit of a perfect storm, in that waiting times have actually increased exponentially over the past couple of years," he said.
Mr Kittel said COVID-19 lockdowns had not only caused waitlists to blow out but also kept children at home, limiting their opportunities to socialise and grow their vocabularies naturally.
"We've had this pandemic, which has actually kept a number of people, particularly in capital cities, very much inside, not necessarily experiencing things that typical three- and four-year-olds experience," he said.
"Like going to the park, for example, or going to the zoo or doing all those sorts of extra things.
"As children are entering school and preschool settings, because their language isn't quite up to speed, there's this huge demand for speech pathology services."
Students aiding swamped speech clinics
While a record number of Australian speech pathology students have graduated over the past five years, none of the ACT's universities offers an undergraduate course.
Mr Kittel said this posed a particular problem for Canberra, as graduates tended to stay in the city they had studied.
"Graduates set up their lives around the universities — they also have their [work] placement very close to the universities," he said.
"It's much more likely that they're going to have their jobs offered to them potentially from their final placement."
Chloe Pascoe recognised this gap in the ACT during her final years of high school.
"I wanted to do speech pathology, but they don't offer the undergraduate course in Canberra," she said.
Instead of moving interstate, Ms Pascoe opted to study occupational therapy at the University of Canberra.
Despite this, she has found another way to help children with speech-sound difficulties: working as an allied health assistant at Capital Therapy Services in Mawson, in Canberra's south.
She has a full caseload of about 100 patients a week, implementing the interventions directed by a senior speech pathologist at the clinic.
"As an occupational therapy student, I'm seeing a lot of different cases and scenarios that we could have seen earlier," she said.
The Mawson clinic received at least five calls a day from parents who had been left to languish on waitlists due to the critical shortage of therapists.
"They're calling up really panicked … and are really feeling down on themselves, like they failed as a parent," she said.
"They've had to basically teach their children [through the pandemic], they've had to be the teacher for online school.
"And that is also why people are feeling so responsible, but it's really not their fault."
Ms Pascoe said parents could help their kids by using simple language and removing unfamiliar words.
"Describe what they're doing in play and use play as a method to teach," she said.
"If we're playing with a farm set, we want to model what sounds the animals are making, things like that, that is just really basic and not overwhelming them."
She also recommended that parents record their children's speech at home so that when they did finally get the opportunity for a diagnostic assessment, the pathologist had a fuller picture of their development.
Master's degree sparks hope for future
While the University of Canberra is not considering developing an undergraduate course for students straight out of high school, it did start a master's program in 2018.
Jacqueline McKechnie, an assistant professor in speech pathology, hopes the degree will encourage more postgraduate students to stay in Canberra after they graduate.
"The program was started here with the hopes that it would draw local students from the ACT and surrounds, but also from regional southern New South Wales, out to the coast," she said.
"We wanted to train people who would hopefully then stay local and help us fix the shortage."
The master's program runs a small research project, exploring different methods parents can employ with their children to improve their speech.
The student-run sessions cost significantly less than visits to private clinics, and include parent training.
"We're trying to build [parents'] capacity to help their children in between their clinical visits," Dr McKechnie said.
Felix now has sessions with the university team as part of the eight-week study.
Just a few weeks into the program, his mother said the results were "pretty promising".
Ms Wilson said her son had especially benefited from turn-based board games and flashcards that integrated speech-sound practise.
"They give us lots of different activities to do at home that make it fun and engaging," she said.
"I have faith in this program that, when it comes to the end of it, we'll be given the tools to continue on and hopefully not need further intervention."
But she said that if Felix needed extra therapy at the end of the eight-week study, she dreaded finding herself at the bottom of another wait list.
"I dread that because it is just very frustrating. So, fingers crossed."
