TORONTO – Thousands more Ontario children with autism are on waiting lists for treatment than 10 years ago, and government figures suggest the number of kids receiving treatment may actually be dropping.<\/p>\n
The NDP submitted a Freedom of Information request for the numbers of children with autism spectrum disorders on wait lists for Intensive Behavioural Intervention and Applied Behaviour Analysis and found dramatically increasing numbers.<\/p>\n
In 2005-06, there were 753 kids waiting for IBI and now there are 2,192. In 2011-12, when ABA funding began, there were 2,784 kids on the wait list and now there are 13,966, though some children may be on both lists.<\/p>\n
Kara Onofrio’s seven-year-old son has been waiting for government-funded treatment for three years, and she has been told he will likely be on the wait list for another two. In the meantime, Onofrio has been paying $40,000 a year out of pocket to have her son in therapy part-time, she said.<\/p>\n
“You feel like your child’s not going to live a full life until you start to see the results from therapy,” Onofrio said. “For my husband and I, $40,000 a year is worth it, but not a lot of families can do that and it’s not fair that they have to suffer.”<\/p>\n
Onofrio, who also established Autism’s Angels _ an organization that raises money for autism charities said the therapy Justin has received has been “life changing.”<\/p>\n
“I can’t fathom where he would be if he didn’t have that intervention early,” she said. “It scares me.”<\/p>\n
Estimates from the Ministry of Children and Youth Services show that the wait lists are growing exponentially faster than the number of children receiving government-funded treatment.<\/p>\n
Only five more children were expected to receive IBI treatment this year than last, an increase of just 61 more children since 2007-08. The number for ABA actually dropped from a high of 8,926 in 2013-13 to 8,000 this year though some children may receive more than one ABA treatment in a year.<\/p>\n
Minister Tracy MacCharles said after question period she was “not entirely sure” about the decrease.<\/p>\n
The government is constantly working to improve the services it provides and is investing more than $190 million in autism services this year, an increase of more than $100 million since 2004, MacCharles said.<\/p>\n
But she couldn’t point to what specifically the government would do to tackle the wait lists, saying it would be part of an autism strategy based on expert advice.<\/p>\n
“We have new diagnostic tools, which may be contributing to the upward climb,” she said. “The reality is the numbers on the wait lists are too high. I would totally agree with that. It’s a huge area of focus for me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TORONTO – Thousands more Ontario children with autism are on waiting lists for treatment than 10 years ago, and government …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":64136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9230],"class_list":["post-64135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-uploads","mauthors-allison-jones","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}