Improving Equitable Access to Disability Services and Support for Children With Neurodevelopmental Disabilities: Service Provider and Decision‐Maker Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Disparity in access to services for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities is a modifiable barrier to improving health, functional outcomes and social participation. Unfortunately, children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities face many barriers in accessing education and disability services and support. This study aimed to describe the perspectives of service providers and decision-makers about disparities in access to disability services and support for children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families. METHODS: Utilizing a qualitative descriptive methodology informed by a pragmatic epistemological approach, we interviewed 16 individual service providers and decision-makers from childhood education and disability services across ministries in British Columbia. Purposeful and maximum variation sampling was used to guide the selection of participants. An advisory council provided patient and family-oriented perspectives and reviewed, piloted and refined the semi-structured interview guide. Data was analysed with inductive thematic analysis. RESULTS: System barriers and facilitators to accessing education and disability services and support were identified both through the navigation journey and across ministries. To address these barriers and leverage facilitators, policy and program design recommendations were identified, including an approach for framing policy as a 'wider door' and developing a holistic system that 'works for everybody'. CONCLUSIONS: Systemic barriers and facilitators intertwine within the system before, during and after engagement with families and children. This creates a complex delivery environment, hindering the equitable provision of disability services and support. The findings provide a systemic and intersectoral overview of the interconnected challenges encountered while navigating the system, relevant to many jurisdictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".