The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) is ignoring expert advice and existing government policy on early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Instead, the NDIA adopted a generic and often inappropriate approach that does not address the distinct needs of children with ASD.

The Department of Health advised families* in 2006 that children with ASD need “best practice” intensive ASD-specific early intervention. Later, the Department of Social Security (formerly FaHCSIA) effectively asked ASD experts “are you sure … and what about just 'good' practice?”. The experts responded pretty much “Yep, we are sure … and 'good practice' isn't much different from 'best practice'” (links* to the report are here MS Word & PDF and the Guidelines for Good practice 2012 MS Word & PDF ... webpage here).

Introduction

The latest NDIS Quarterly Report (up to 31/3/2014) [MS Word or PDF] shows that more NDIS participants (24%) have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than any other distinct disability type. There was a sudden increase from the previous two quarterly reports that showed no NDIS participants with “autism” at all (previously, we assume the NDIS hid participants with ASD in other categories, such as “intellectual disability” or “neurological disorder”).

Australian Governments largely ignore the simple fact that generic disability services, often called specialist disability services, do not meet the disability service and support needs of people with ASD. The ABS reported the dire outcomes for people with ASD experience in Australia: see http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4428.0. The consequences of neglecting their specific needs is that people with ASD experience abysmal outcomes in education, labour force participation and service access; people with ASD have appalling outcomes that are far worse than those reported for people with a disability generally.

A review of the ACT Government's latest report on services for people affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) gives the ACT Government a "fail".

Executive Summary

The Legislative Assembly asked the ACT Government to report on “support provided for autism diagnosis and services and the potential for further reforms”. The Minister presented the report to the Assembly in May 2013. Following numerous requests, the Minister gave a copy of the report to representative of people affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on 23/4/2014. The Minister took 11 months to hand over a copy of the report to the ASD community in the ACT.

This review of that report finds that the ACT Government's information about ASD and the service and support needs of people affected by ASD is often incorrect. For example, the report under-estimates the number of Australian children diagnosed with ASD by an enormous factor of three (3).

A presentation (see this) at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) 2014 shows from health insurance records (from USA) that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have higher rates of some other health issues than do people without ASD.