Ontario government won’t disclose progress in launching autism program




Allison Jones, The Canadian Press



Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2022 at 4:37 p.m. EDT




TORONTO – The Ontario government is refusing to publicly disclose its progress in enrolling children in basic therapies for autism, after the latest update showed it was falling far short of its own goal.

Merrilee Fullerton, minister for children, community and social services, has said the government will get 8,000 children into basic clinical services by the end of the autumn, but until last month that number was just 888.

Government officials said at the time that movement was initially slow due to the launch of a new admissions process, and said those numbers would start to grow exponentially.

But Fullerton’s office declined to provide an update on those numbers in response to a request from The Canadian Press this month.

“As thousands of invitations are on the doorstep of families, and at different stages, providing these numbers no longer reflects the launch of the Ontario Autism Program as it once did,” spokesman Patrick Bissett said in a statement.

Bissett did not respond to follow-up inquiries asking for further explanation and whether that meant those numbers would ever be provided again.

NDP critic Monique Taylor called it “embarrassing”.

“That’s not transparent and that’s not what families need or want,” he said. “They have such a failed program and they have such a failed deployment that they are now hiding.”

Alina Cameron’s seven-year-old daughter has been on the waiting list for government-funded therapy since October 30, 2017 and said seeing enrollment progress is not just a matter of transparency, but a matter of financial planning.

His family has managed to improvise some treatments, paying out of pocket for part-time therapy, but nowhere near the $93,000 a year that he has been prescribed clinically.

Cameron is paying nearly $900 a week for part-time services, and she doesn’t know how much longer she has to plan to cover that, or if she needs to cut back on her daughter’s treatment even more, or maybe make a new plan with the bank. she said.

“(With enrollment updates) we would generally know what’s going on with the program, be able to estimate our time on the waiting list and be financially prepared to fill that gap between now and when our children are invited,” Cameron said.

“But beyond that, it gives us hope that it will come.”

As of last month, the government had sent some 6,300 letters to families inviting them to register on the new intake portal. Another 5,000 letters were scheduled to go out by the end of August, but so far, the response has been less than officials expected.

Fewer than 1,700 families responded to the letter and registered in the new system as of mid-August, officials said. The next step in the new process is to send out invitations to families to participate in an interview to determine their child’s level of need, and nearly 300 of those have been sent out.

Of those 300 children, 30 had been enrolled in basic clinical services since the end of July, officials said last month.

They went in order of registration, meaning they started with children who first sought therapy in 2015. Officials have said some may no longer need the service.

This is the second attempt by the Progressive Conservative government at a new autism programme. They scrapped their initial 2019 plan to give each family on the waiting list $20,000 or $5,000 depending on the age of their child after swift and sustained protests. Outraged families said funding should not be decided by age and that the amounts were too low for children who need moderate to intensive therapy.

The government went back to the drawing board, but in the meantime, more than 3,000 children who were receiving government-funded therapy through the previous Liberal government’s old autism program were protected so that the children did not suffer a break in service.

But Angela Brandt, president of the Ontario Autism Coalition, said that means families now enrolling in the basic services of the current government program are likely to be children already receiving therapy, since they would have been enrolled in the program longer. .

“They promised us to get 8,000 kids off the waiting list by the fall of 2022 and what they are doing now is still not going to deliver on that promise,” he said.

“Basically, what they’re doing is just transitioning kids based on the name of the show… So it’s just administrative changes. But that’s not helping kids who have been waiting up to eight years.”

More than 56,000 children are now registered with the Ontario Autism Program. The vast majority have not received funding for basic services, but most have received one-time payments, and thousands have accessed other parts of the program, including early childhood services, basic family services, and a school entry program. school.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on September 25, 2022.


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