Parents question autism funding plan
Cutting wait-list times for autism services is great. But what then?
That’s the question parents of children on the autism spectrum who spoke to the Citizen had after the provincial government announced its new autism strategy on Wednesday.
“It will address bringing down the wait-list numbers, but I think it’s short-sighted,” said Scott Corbett, a Barrhaven father with two boys on the spectrum.
The lifetime funding caps of $140,000 for a child entering the system at age two, and $55,000 for one aged seven, won’t begin to cover the costs of expensive therapies such as IBI (intensive behavioural intervention) or ABA (applied behavioural analysis), he said.
“We need a continuum of services. I’ve yet to see an example where kids go through intensive therapy and then they don’t need any more supports, like there’s no more problem,” Corbett said. “You’re not going to find any parents who’ll say, ‘Yes we did that (therapy) and now my kid is like a typical child.’ It just doesn’t happen.”
Corbett’s younger son, Sam, 9, received seven hours a day of IBI through a private clinic at a cost of $8,800 a month, which is completely covered by government funding. (It wasn’t always that way: The family paid out of pocket for a reduced number of hours when he was younger, later receiving partial funding for the therapy as he grew older.)
There’s no way the new plan will cover that cost, said Corbett, who two years ago joined protests at Queen’s Park to put pressure on the previous Liberal government to bolster its funding support for autism.
“That level of intensity, you would burn through that in 6 ½ months and there would be no more money whatsoever. It’s putting parents in a real bind.”
And though parents will appreciate having control over how to spend their funding, good luck trying to find a therapist, he says.
“They’ll get their money and they’re going to try to get services,” he said. “There’s going to suddenly be another 23,000 kids who need a therapist. There’s just no way they’ll be able to ramp up to accommodate that number.”
Krista Ryan of Alexandria, 90 minutes east of Ottawa, has been waiting two years for her son, Xavier, to begin IBI therapy. Xavier, 5, is on the autism spectrum, is non-verbal and has global developmental delays. Ryan hopes to take an online course in IBI that would help her work with Xavier under the guidance of a registered IBI therapist.
She, too, worries that the lifetime cap of $140,000 funding won’t be enough.
“What’s going to happen when the kids who don’t get the help they need now become adults?” Ryan said.
Many children on the spectrum will also deal with mental-health issues over their lifetimes, she said.