Thursday, June 11, 2009        
Frontenacthisweek.com      Kingstonthisweek.com 

Health

Lack of funding fails children who need it most

EMMA TAYLOR
Kingston This Week

Since 1993 the number of children across the province needing mental health services has more than doubled from 73,153 to 201, 556, and there is no sign that these numbers are slowing.

In light of these sobering figures Pat McGregor, intake worker at Pathways for Children and Youth, questions why the government continually fails to fund children’s mental health agencies both in Kingston and across the province.

Pathways services children from 0-18 in five community site offices; Divisions St. Princes St. and Kingslake Plaza in Kingston as well as Napanee and Sydenham Children could have anything from a diagnosed condition of autism to psychosis or simply a case of struggling in school because a learning disability hasn’t been identified.

McGregor said that when Deborah Matthews, the Minister of Children and Youth Services came into office on October 30, 2007 she gave a small funding increase.

“Well, it hasn’t held us because we haven’t had an increase in over 13 years. What she gave us didn’t even plug the hole.”

Despite the fact that there have been increases in rent, hydro and gas, there have been no funding increases and the budget has been completely frozen, she said.

Not enough money means not enough staff to handle the increased referrals Pathways has experienced since the economic recession has begun. “We don’t have the capacity to deal with it, so we are developing wait lists. That wait list interferes with how quickly we can respond to the community.”

McGregor said that can have far-reaching impacts in the community and programs that those children may be associated with, including flashback into the school system.

The lack of investment puts the community at risk and it becomes a mental health issue, said McGregor.

“When they knock on our door they need the help now, and we have to be able to say we’re here now, not six weeks down the road. I think it’s a real slap to our kids that they don’t deserve people to be there in a time of crisis.”

Laura Dugan, Senior Communications Advisor for the Office of the Honourable Debora Matthews, said that they are working to create a children’s mental health system that delivers what children need, when they need it, as close to home as possible.

“After years of frozen funding by previous governments, our government provided children’s mental health agencies with the first base funding increase in over a decade in 2004/05 and another $24.5 million in 2007/08,” said Dugan.

Increase funding has also been provided for enhanced and expanded children and youth mental health services every year from 2004/05 to 2008/09, totally $38.2 million, she said.

McGregor said that money has gone primarily to funding for autism which has had a very high profile. “Which it should because they weren’t getting what they needed, but the core funding hasn’t been increase.”

Theresa Babcock is a mother of four, and her youngest son who is now a teenager was diagnosed with ADHD at age two. Luckily, Babcock was seen within six weeks of referral. Pathways has supported both her son and her family through crisis periods including the illness and death of her middle son.

“If Pathways hadn’t been there, family breakdowns would have happened easily and I was really grateful that it happened quickly,” she said.

Babcock gets very angry at what she says is the government’s lack of concern for the people that work within the field of children’s mental health services, “it is our children who can end up within the legal system and God forbids in the penal system. You are talking about not investing funds to children’s mental health services, and it is out kids that fall through the cracks.”

She said that statistic have proven that it’s far more expensive to warehouse a person who has entered into criminal activity than it is to create the funds to pay for the front line people that are dealing with children’s mental health services.

 

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