According to the latest statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare, Värmland and Kalmar are the bottom league when it comes to how many speech therapists there are per 100,000 inhabitants.
Far below the national average, and despite some investments, Värmland has slipped down the list instead of climbing.
- That we are low is probably not due to the fact that we have become fewer, but that other regions have invested more than we have in recent years, says Susanna Wennerfelt, head of the subcontracting unit in the Värmland region.
Speech therapists upset
Wennerfelt mentions, among others, Norrköping, which has made a large investment in school speech therapists in the municipality.
In their motion, the Social Democrats do not write that more speech therapists are needed, but that they need to increase speech therapy competence.
Something that made speech therapists so angry that they reacted with submitters, where it is stated, among other things, that no one would dream of calling police officers "police competence".
- We as lay people may not always express ourselves correctly in technical terms, and if anyone has misunderstood, I apologize.
But we mean speech therapists and nothing else, says Mats Sandberg.