Vernon specialist calling for better autism supports province wide

A Vernon woman is looking to put youth special needs services at the forefront of the upcoming provincial election.

Aimee Carson, who operates Honeybee Pediatric Therapy formerly Carson Therapy, said changes need to occur to services for youth with special needs and a group has formed to make it an election issue.

“There is a severe shortage of health professionals who provide services to youth with autism and other special needs in BC and Vernon is no exception. Most local pediatric agencies and organizations currently have vacancies for pediatric service providers,” said Carson.

Carson said Honeybee is the only private clinic in the North Okanagan that provides speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy for children.

“We are a family owned business that is locally owned and operated and we understand the unique needs and challenges of services for youth in our community. We have been working extremely hard to recruit more services to Vernon and after over more than a year of recruiting we have just hired two new speech-language pathologists and a pediatric physiotherapist to our team,” she said.

To help address the labour situation, Carson was instrumental in uniting other health care professionals in forming the Collaborative Alliance of British Columbia for Children and Youth with Disabilities.

The alliance was formed due to the labour shortage, and proposed changes the government has recently made to funding and support services - including the unrolling of the family connections centres, and potential elimination of individualized funding.

Carson said the government paused the unrolling of the new funding model for services to children (Family Connections Hubs) and the pilot project has generally been deemed unsuccessful.

“We are a dedicated coalition of organizations, family members and professionals, and our mission is to amplify the diverse voices within the disability community.” Carson said. “We are committed to ensuring that government policies not only honour the rights of children and youth with special and diverse needs but also address systemic inequities and advocate for individualized supports and family choice when it comes to supports for youth with special needs.”

Carson said with the upcoming election, parents or others who want to have their voices heard can sign up on the coalition's website supportbcfamilies.ca where they will have the option to write an email that will be automatically sent to electoral candidates to draw attention to the issues around services for children and youth with special needs.