Provider Practices Regarding the Treatment Referrals and Recommendations Made to Parents of a Child with ASD

Background: Literature in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) field has highlighted that parents endorse individual recommendations as being critical in the choices that they make about service use for their child with ASD. However, research has yet to examine how intervention-related knowledge and referrals are provided to parents by providers in the community. The current study sought to clarify providers’ experience when attempting to guide parents to the appropriate services for their child.     

Objectives: The current study sought to determine: 1) the types of referrals made by community providers to parents of a child with ASD (i.e. generic referrals versus specific referrals); 2) provider-reported barriers when making referrals to ASD services in the community; and 3) the variables that predict providers’ referrals to high quality, evidence-based practices (EBPs).

Methods: 82 providers working with of children with an ASD diagnosis completed an online survey that assessed the following: 1) provider demographic information; 2) years of experience working with children with ASD; 3) professional confidence; 4) professional competence; 5) perceived barriers to making service recommendations in the community; 6) belief in evidence-based practices; 7) service referrals commonly made; and 8) strategies used to make referrals.  Service referrals were broken down in order to analyze the variables that predicted providers’ likelihood of making referrals to evidence-based practices (EBPs). 

Results: Overall, 86.14% of the referrals that providers reported making were to EBPs. As part of preliminary data analysis, a stepwise, multiple linear regression was used to determine the variables that predicted the number of referrals that providers made to EBPs.  As can be seen in Table 1, the final model explained 25% of the variance in referrals made to EBPs, with provider confidence and perceived barriers to service referrals as significant predictors of evidence-based referrals. Finally, providers noted many barriers when making referrals to services for families of a child with ASD in community settings. The most common of these barriers were a lack of availability of services, and a lack of insurance coverage for particular services, each being reported by over 65% of participating providers.  

Conclusions: Research within the ASD field has already documented that parents endorse individual recommendations as being critical in the choices that they make about service use for their child with ASD. However research had yet to examine how these recommendations are made to parents by providers in the community. The current study provides perspective on providers’ experience in making referrals, and provides important implications for the ways in which we disseminate EBPs into community settings.