Parents will no longer have to spend thousands of dollars chasing autism diagnoses for their children to qualify for disability support under the new Thriving Kids program, which will help children with lower support needs outside the NDIS. Source: The Age.
After federal and state governments last week signed a long-awaited health and disability funding deal, Health and Disability Minister Mark Butler yesterday unveiled the model for Thriving Kids and revealed it would mainly be run through states and territories.
The Albanese Government rebuffed a suggestion from its advisory group that children access therapies through new Medicare plans, and will instead give states money to run the scheme their own way. “We won’t be funding services directly. We’ll be providing that money to states,” Mr Butler said.
“[They] will largely leverage off a lot of programs they already run … It won’t be a traditional Medicare-funded allied health professional visit, that might be bulk billed or might attract a gap fee. This will be quite a different model that state governments, particularly, asked us for.”
Each jurisdiction will devise its own system for supporting tens of thousands of children, aged eight and under, who have autism or developmental delays – many of whom currently have individual packages through the $48 billion NDIS.
State systems will be expected to adhere to the same model, which has four key functions: identifying when children have developmental delays or differences; providing easy access to information about where to get help; supplying programs and tools for parents to build their own skills; and providing targeted support, including therapies and equipment, for children who need it.
The federal government will support Thriving Kids with national components – such as information campaigns, online resources and a call line – but it will otherwise be delivered by states and territories, which will scale up their existing services as well as establish new ones.
Yesterday’s release of the Thriving Kids model comes after Mr Butler’s taskforce took over the design last August because the states and territories were too slow, after first agreeing to help run new services for kids in late 2023.
Autism diagnoses have soared in Australia in the last decade – a trend some experts attribute to the NDIS requirements.
Thriving Kids will start rolling out from October this year and launch fully by January 2028.
FULL STORY
Children won’t need an autism diagnosis to use Thriving Kids scheme (By Natassia Chrysanthos, The Age)
