Speak Out OCTOBER 2021 DIGITAL EDITION

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Member Q&A Autism diagnosis in private practice

Senior Advisor for Disability Amy Fitzpatrick speaks to private practice owners and long term SPA members and volunteers, Gloria Staios and Christine Kendall about their 20-year plus business relationship. They chatted about keeping their private practice running in Metropolitan Melbourne, while focusing on diagnosing and working with autistic children and their families, and mentoring a team of passionate and excellent clinicians. They also spoke about how the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia fit into their daily practice.

Can you tell me about your business relationship and how you came to open your practice? In the late 1980s we both worked at a large disability organisation providing special school and early intervention services, which is where we met and found our passion for working with people with disability, particularly kids with complex communication needs, in particular AAC and those requiring support with eating and drinking. After we had our own kids our work circumstances changed and Gloria started working at Western Autistic School (WAS), in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne, and Chris soon came on board. At the time, in the 90’s, the school was small and the teachers were phenomenal. We loved working in the classroom with teachers who shared our passion, and loved working with speech pathologists. It was an exciting time and one of the great benefits of working with teachers was that they would enthusiastically implement our suggestions and ideas for the children’s communication and we could see their development over time. We were also starting to see some autistic children privately and it was around this time that Asperger’s Syndrome was becoming more recognised. We were beginning to see children with this profile but didn’t have a diagnosis of autism – they were not language delayed and yet, we recognised their pragmatic differences. So, we hired a room to trial running some parent workshops, bought some assessment kits, employed our first speech pathologist- who as a fourth-year student had been working with some of the families as a therapy assistant, and really “got” the kids she was working with. And just like that, our private practice was born! At the time, private practice and fee for service wasn’t really a common service delivery model for people with disability,

but we were committed to offering high quality options for families, so pushed on. These were the early days of working with autistic children and very little was known about best practice because there was limited clinical research available to guide us. In the beginning, as we grew, our therapists worked part time at Western Autistic School and part time in the clinic, which provided great training as well as a broad perspective across different ages and environments. What made this successful was the inspirational leadership in the school, who valued speech pathologists as an integral part of the team, and we continued contracting at the school for 12 years. This ultimately led to us being on the Steering Committee for the Autism Teaching Institute (ATI), where we lectured post-graduate diploma and certificate students in communication, for teachers from all over Victoria, for 14 years. We have recently retired from our roles with the ATI. So, it started as a friendship and a shared passion, and now it’s also business built out of mutual respect and a

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Speak Out | October 2021