THUNDER BAY – The George Jeffrey Children’s Centre provides services to 1,800 children every year, but it’s the nearly 500 in the city and district of Thunder Bay currently on their wait list pushing the organization to want to do more.
The children’s centre joined the other provincially funded children’s treatment centres to call on political parties to commit to spending an additional $120 million, beginning with $40 million in 2018-2019, for the children’s rehabilitation service sector.
There are 27,000 children across Ontario waiting for services from their local children’s treatment centre, including 488 in the Thunder Bay area alone.
“That’s just a small portion of our catchment area,” said Tom Walters, the chief executive officer of the George Jeffrey Children’s Centre. “There is a lot of unmet need in the broader Northwestern Ontario, particularly among the Indigenous communities. Some of that even hasn’t been identified to a large enough extent.”
Stephanie Ash, director of the Ontario Association of Children’s Rehabilitation Services, said the recommended spending is overdue and urgently needed to not only reduce the wait lists but improve the quality and frequency of services.
“One of the things we’re hearing from parents in this region and also across the province is that their children, when they do finally come to a (treatment centre) for service they may receive a few blocks of service. They may come to see a therapist for four to six sessions but then they go back to wait for another year,” Ash said.
“Imagine having a child who has speech language needs or a physical disability that prevents them from walking, this is not continued ongoing therapy and treatment to help them progress and advance in the way that they need to.”
Services provided include speech language therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and other specialized programs provided by regulated health professionals. There are other non-core services such as musical and recreational therapy, which some children’s treatment centres are not able to provide.
Accessing those services at a young age can make a major difference later in life, Ash said.
“These are children who are not able to reach their potential, potentially go to school independently or even into the workforce and find meaningful employment because they’re not receiving early years services during those critical young years between zero and six,” Ash said.
Walters said early interventions lead to better outcomes.
“We know with kids that are autistic, for instance, if you can start to intervene at an early age you can start to help them develop patterns of speech or you can help them have different methodologies to communicate,” Walters said.
“Without doing that early you have lots of delays. You have kids that aren’t developing to their full potential and it weighs heavily not only on the parents but on our staff because they desperately want to help these kids.”
Walters said locally the centre seems readily able to meet the need for physiotherapy but speech services and occupational therapy are pressure points for the organization.
The demand takes a toll on the centre’s staff, Walters added.
“They feel the pressure,” Walters said. “Probably the biggest concern that I have is staff saying their case load is so large and they have so much to do they can’t get to everything.”
