THUNDER BAY –Thunder Bay families have a new place to turn for autism therapy services. The region has a chronic shortage of behavioural therapy for children with autism, which has only worsened under recent changes by the Ford government.
Creative Therapy Associates, which has offered speech and occupational therapy in the region for over 30 years, recently expanded to offer Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) therapy, as well as training programs for parents.
Local options for those kinds of services, which can provide crucial developmental support to children with autism, were drastically reduced in 2019 when the provincial government changed the structure of its autism support programs.
Northern Ontario’s largest service provider, Child and Community Resources, announced in the fall that it had lost 90 positions due to those changes, and would no longer be able to provide services to many clients.
The new services offered by Creative Therapy Associates will provide at least some relief for that shortfall. With seven ABA therapists, the group is starting with a capacity of 12 children for full-time services, in addition to other less intensive offerings. The program is supervised remotely by a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA), making it eligible for funding provided to parents under the Ontario government’s new autism services model.
For parent Ruba Abdul Hadi, the new services make a world of difference. Her four year old son Kareem was diagnosed with autism in 2018. Since then, it’s been a struggle to find services in the region and navigate the province’s changing rules.
“Once the changes to the program were announced, I began to panic, because I knew early intervention was key,” she says, “and in northwestern Ontario we didn’t have access to service providers.”
She began working with Creative Therapy, where her son had already done some speech therapy, to see if the company could expand into autism services. A partnership with Shine Through, a GTA-based service provider, helped make the idea a reality. Liz Hathazi, a director at Creative Therapy, says working with Ruba’s son helped inspire her team to expand into autism services.
“We started making some gains, but we knew what he needed was intensive services, and she couldn’t access any,” she explains. “That really impacted us and made us work hard toward getting services developed.”
Since her son began behavioural therapy in October, Abdul Hadi has already seen a positive impact.
“In that short period of time, it’s been life-altering for our family,” she says. “He was non-verbal. [Now] his vocabulary has expanded, he’s more interactive with his peers, his sister is really enjoying playing with him. He’ll actually initiate play, where in the past he had no interest in playing with others.”
Meaghan McCallum, the lead behavioural therapist at Creative Therapy, says Abdul Hadi’s experience is a perfect example of why she’s so passionate about the work they’re doing.
“It’s probably the most rewarding job out there,” she says. “There’s really no words to describe how rewarding it is to teach a child to respond to their name or to speak. There are lots of things we take for granted when we have a typical developing child.”
But even with this expansion in local services, many families in northwestern Ontario face challenges in finding and affording treatment. The province is working on further changes to the system, responding to an outcry from families. In the meantime, parents are expected to receive between $5,000 and $20,000 per year to help pay for services under the province’s current system. The money is not expected to arrive until March, while intensive therapy can often cost more than $60,000 per year.
Abdul Hadi says her family is lucky in that they’ve been able to afford to pay for services out of pocket, so far. But even so, dealing with the uncertainty about provincial support and long waits for services has been difficult.
“Being in limbo and having that wait period puts us in a crisis, in a sense,” she says. “It can be very frustrating emotionally, and not having the support financially can be difficult as well.”
For residents outside of Thunder Bay, the challenge is even greater. Melanie Manula, another director at Creative Therapy, says they work with several First Nations communities to offer speech and occupational therapy. They’re hoping to take a similar approach with autism services as well.
“Obviously because of the cost of travelling, it is difficult to provide services at the intensity level we would in our own community,” she says.
Their long term goal is to identify people living in those communities willing to undergo training to offer services locally.
