Ms Lisa Marie Clinton:

There are three elements to this. First, when we look at why we developed avail, I took a step back to ask what our goal is when we work with people with autism, or even people more broadly. It is to enable them to be independent. If we look at the blockers to enabling them to be independent, that is where I question how technology can remove those blockers. Somebody may require one-to-one supports or prompting but if we could utilise technology not to replace but to augment the service delivery we may be providing. It could be an educator or a job coach. The job coach cannot be there 24-7 and we do not want that. The individual does not want that either, so how can we deliver digital job prompts such as video, pictorial, audio or text prompts. The only prompt we cannot provide is a full physical prompt, which we do not want to be providing. That was the genesis of why avail was created. For me personally, when I worked with families and children with autism it was to augment and extend the therapy I provided. They were paying privately so I wanted to give better value and increase outcomes for the children I worked with. Lo and behold, a lot more people had these challenges. That is why I was adamant and had the desire to scale what we were doing. Thank God, we are helping thousands of individuals to achieve independence.

Deputy Ó Murchú mentioned the assessment regarding the 76% increase in the acquisition of skills. We are delivering digital prompts and the example was independent living. We know that for children and adults with autism, there needs to be repetition. Repetition is key to learning a skill. We can provide 24-7 repetition and, guess what, if we provide these prompts all of the time, people learn these skills at a much faster pace. When we measured it against the traditional methods we were able to increase the acquisition of skills and of that goal at a much faster pace. That meant that the organisation could reallocate resources and serve more individuals or increase the goals it had thought it might not have been able to work on because it had to provide a level of one-to-one. We could, therefore, extend learning to teach more skills.

Those are some of the outcomes. A video is available which I will share later. It shows the return that this organisation had and many have to follow.