‘State has failed to keep pledge on autism’

IRISH Autism Action (IAA) will spend €450,000 and screen 300 children this year because it says the Government has failed in its promise to give every autistic child the best shot at education.

The 2001 Task Force on Autism recommended an assessment programme be set up that would diagnose and suggest therapy at the earliest opportunity.

Five years on, the charity sanctioned the funds from its Round Ireland Cycle to try and make inroads on a 1,500 child waiting list for psychological, occupational therapy and speech therapy assessments.

IAA chief executive Kevin Whelan said: “I imagined that an implementation body would have been established after the task force issued its report but this has not happened.

“The task force is sitting there but the State is looking at the delivery at one end rather than sorting things out at the start.”

The 2001 report recommended a multi-agency team be set up in each health board area to coordinate the assessment and education of autistic children.

It also demanded that, at a minimum, each child should begin therapy 30 days after diagnosis and have additional assessments every three to six months after that.

Last month, the IAA launched its self-funded programme of assessments by taking an educational psychologist to Kerry to report on six children expecting to wait two years for diagnosis and therapy. The report had previously outlined why minimal waiting times were so important.

It said: “Late diagnosis precludes the majority of pre-school children and many primary/secondary school children and their families of the benefits of early intervention, appropriate educational, clinical and family support.”

Mr Whelan said the IAA was using its resources to set up the National Diagnostic Centre in Clontarf and prepare holistic reports on each child which can then be used to plot their unique educational needs. “There are different waiting lists for the psychological assessment, speech therapy assessment and occupational therapy assessment, but at the moment the longest is for psychological assessment because this is the stage a child is diagnosed with autism. You might have two children diagnosed as autistic but their needs are substantially different.”

A spokesperson for HSE said it was trying to recruit 170 extra therapists to cope with the extra workload arising from its plan to assess all children from June 2007.

It said: “The HSE is putting in place area-based multi-disciplinary, early intervention teams to provide services to all children with developmental delays, including autism.”