The Association for Autism of Slovenia often turns to competent ministries to regulate the field of education, training, employment, and better health care. That is why we recognize them as important target groups in this project as well. For the needs of the national strategy for better care for children, adolescents, and adults with autism and their families, we need basic information – how many of these people there are in Slovenia. Since we have addressed this challenge in this project, we also want to inform the competent ministries of the findings. The field of therapeutic and medical treatment of children in Slovenia has been unregulated for many years. Since we do not have a known number of people with autism in Slovenia, we also do not have an effective national strategy for providing sufficient health services. Therefore, we estimate that the presentation of the results of our research at the Ministry of Health will help regulate this area.
The results of both surveys (prevalence of autism in Slovenia and the needs of employees in education and training) address two important challenges in the field of education and training, namely that due to the lack of knowledge of the number of children and adolescents with autism in Slovenia, we do not have an adequate national strategy for training a sufficient number of appropriately qualified personnel, which would ensure better conditions for the education of children, adolescents and young people with autism, with an emphasis on skills and competencies for work and life in the 21st century and for the acquisition of better social competences and self-initiative as well as transversal skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and initiative, they need a teacher with better competence.
Therefore, we think it is important to inform the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports about the results of both surveys.
Until now, no government institution in Slovenia has paid attention to employers in the context of first investigating what employers need to hire people with autism, and offering them that. In Slovenia, a large proportion of young people with autism are unemployed, which brings great hardships into their lives, so we want to encourage the Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Affairs, and Equal Opportunities to become actively involved in solving this challenge and establish interdepartmental cooperation.
