Deborah Coyne - Time Overdue To Put Autism On The National Agenda

Deborah Coyne has joined the Medicare for Autism Now team and will be one of the speakers when the team visits Oakville, Ontario on April 19, 2008 as part of a national initiative that will include speakers from BC to Toronto to New Brunswick. (AutismRealityNB will also be there).

Deborah has spent her life engaged in public policy work. She is a lawyer, university professor, constitutional activist, public servant, writer, small businessperson and the mother of two children, one of whom is on the autism spectrum. She has often been at the centre of the great public debates of our times -she became a leading figure actively engaged in the constitutional debates that unfolded involving the Meech Lake Accord and the referendum on the Charlottetown Accord. She is currently a policy analyst with an international consulting practice.

Deborah has also started a blog site Canadians Without Borders On the future of our great country, the challenges we face and what lies beyond the horizon . Yesterday was World Autism Awareness Day and Deborah wasted no time weighing in on the subject of Canada's need for a national autism strategy in Time overdue to put autism on the national agenda Medicare for the twenty-first century. I encourage everyone to add Deborah's blog to their blogrolls or blog links. Deborah's blog will be a source of well informed, quality, legal and policy perspectives on a number of important issues including a National Autism Strategy to ensure the proper effective treatment and education of all autistic Canadians - wherever they live in Canada.

It is now beyond debate that the most effective type of autism treatment is Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) – something which involves intensive one-on-one assistance to parents and their ASD child at the earliest possible age. ABA is an enormously valuable and justifiable investment in a huge and growing number of young persons who have a great deal to contribute to society and who need not be a heavy burden on the health care system as they grow older.

Provinces do try to meet the needs of ASD children, but in a haphazard ad hoc way generally through social services mainly for respite and support, not medical treatment. And much depends on the uneven ability of parents to access the necessary funding and services available. Only Alberta has complied with a court order requiring the province to fully fund the appropriate medical treatment for autism - ABA intervention - through the health care system.

Effective autism treatment of course impacts both health care and education. We need not only the investment in people to provide the services through the health care system – ABA specialists, speech therapists, child psychologists etc – but also the investment in the people needed to provide the services in the education system, notably one-on-one teachers’ assistants.

autism

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