On Saturday, The Children’s Wellness Centre in Kingston is hosting the grand opening of a new Pediatric Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) clinic.
It’s a space that’s dedicated to providing services to all children, and specifically those with Autism Spectrum Disorder and other developmental disabilities.
The Children’s Wellness Centre has previously offered in-home services on a consultative basis, primarily focused on providing parents or caregivers with training around common issues their child may deal with, often related to issues like feeding, sleep, or toilet training.
Generally, The Wellness Centre’s focus is on helping children with developmental disabilities learn the daily living skills that tend to come more easily to their peers.
Megan Smith, Clinical Director and co-founder of The Wellness Centre, says the opening of this new clinic now allows them to expand their services to offer one-to-one services between therapists and children with developmental disabilities.
“We were just consulting to families and trying to help teach caregivers kind of how to increase these skills in these areas,” Smith said.
“Opening the center… we’ve hired therapists so that we can do one-to-one skill building… That’s not something we were really doing before and we were really focused on caregiver mediated services.”
Smith says there’s a huge waitlist for families to access community and clinic based behavioural services, often exceeding six months just to access services, and she and her team are hopeful this expansion can help cut down that waitlist.
She says the services they’ll now be able to offer have been sought after by their existing clients for some time.
“We heard from clients who accessed our service while they were on a waitlist for the one-to-one service how long they had been waiting for,” Smith said.
“We just thought it was something that we could kind of help fill a gap in the community.”
The most recent data released in June points towards over 73,000 children in Ontario on the waitlist to access Ontario’s Autism Program.
Smith says the changes Ontario has made to accessing its Autism Program have made it harder on service providers, children, and their caregivers.
“Within that world of autism we all know that early and comprehensive intervention is really, really important, so it’s a huge challenge for all families,” Smith said.
“Before it was kind of like we had these funding service service providers that would work with and families were kind of coming through the door based on just being on a list, kind of when their turn came up. So now it’s like families having to manage the funds and kind of advocating themselves, for their children, and navigating through the system.”
The Wellness Centre’s grand opening for the new clinic was held on Saturday September 28, and they’re officially open for business and accepting clients for the new services.
