Appeal for therapy subsidy for children with autism under 2.5 years old

I am Brian's mother. He was given a diagnosis of suspected autism in late April 2016 when he was about just 20 months. The only reason why it is not a full diagnosis is because he is under 3 years old. Upon knowing Brian's condition, my husband decided not work to focus his time on him, alongside our 2 other young children. We became a single-income household, effectively even qualifying for CHAS once the year of income assessment renews in 2017.

The heart of our appeal is a need for speech and occupational therapies at a frequency that will help us replicate what expert therapists are doing to help him. Not even at the 20 hours a week recommendation from what research have shown (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130084720.htm), but a desperate grasp at getting resources to support what we can try at home with Brian.

This began our journey of realizing there is very limited help for autistic children who are diagnosed before three. Subsided therapies at Jurong Medical Centre (JMC) can only be booked once a fortnight for 4 sessions. That is 4 therapies over 2 months. Then we cannot book any sessions until the 4 sessions are used up and we end up with 1-2 months of not having any subsidized therapies. Government endorsed therapy centres known as Early Intervention Programme for Infants & Children (EIPIC) have a typical wait time of 9-12 months from time of registration to actual assessment to enrollment.

We decided to try the Enhanced Pilot for Private Intervention Providers (Enhanced PPIP) to at least have a therapy session a week so my husband can replicate the exercises at home while waiting for a EIPIC centre. We went through the prescribed route of seeking a recommendation letter from JMC, worked with SG Enable and went all the way to seek an appeal to get a monthly $500 subsidy under the Enhanced PPIP as my son simply is too young for all the recommended programs. The minimum age is 2.5 years old for most of the centres under this scheme. The private therapies cost $170 per 1 hour session.

Today, after 2 months of private therapies whenever we can't get subsidised therapies, Brian is showing progress in terms of eye contact with loved ones and singular and double word utterances when he used to only cry and whine. However, we had 2 months of long silence from the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), where repeated appeals via email and phone calls to SG Enable and MSF gave us more despair and pain. The latest call from a MSF representative (she did not email her response) to try to account for the delay in processing of our appeal was that MSF is even considering scrapping the one-to-one intervention appeal cases, without even realising that my son is on appeal because the Enhanced PPIP does not factor in very young toddlers or even babies that have been diagnosed by doctors as awareness about autism increases (http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/more-preschoolers/2515698.html).

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