A Longford Senator says Government must provide financial support to families accessing private autism assessment and therapies due to long waiting lists.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Autism which is Chaired by Micheal Carrigy published its final report today. Senator Carrigy says there was an extensive amount of discussion over the last 12 months with meetings taking place with various support groups, advocates, universities, ministers and government departments.
109 recommendations are made in the report which deals with topics such as education, disability services, housing, social protection and employment. Speaking on Let's Talk Senator Carrigy says one aspect includes providing support to those accessing private services as well as a campaign to attract therapists to vacant positions.
'The reality is there's 800 positions across the 90-odd CDNT's across the country, fully funded by government, but unfortunately we don't have enough people qualified in those areas, to actually fill those positions.
We need to think outside the box, we already had discussions with Minister Harris with regard to additional course places in those therapies, be it 'Speech and Language' , 'Occupational therapy', 'Pyschology', and to put incentives in place to bring back to Ireland, those professionals that we've trained, to a very , very high standard.'
