Minister Crevits wants to pay healthcare allowance faster
Today, parents have to wait an average of 300 days between application and approval. Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Family Hilde Crevits wants to significantly shorten this turnaround time. “Children with extra support needs receive a health care allowance. Today they have to wait almost a year after the application. That’s too long. We want to shorten that period to a few months. In the long term, we also want to evolve towards automatic allocation of rights and a so-called secure advance, so that people can count on compensation more quickly,” says Crevits.
Waiting time of 300 days on average
Children with extra support needs, for example as a result of ADHD, ASD or diabetes, can obtain a health care allowance via the Groeipakket. This supplement varies from 85 euros to 570 euros per month, depending on the support need. At the moment there are on average more than 300 days between the application for a health care allowance and the decision. For a first application this is an average of 358 days, for a revision 231 days and for a request for revision 394 days.
Some 13,000 new applications for health care benefits are currently awaiting processing and the number of health care benefits revisions is estimated at around 10,000 per year. The Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and the Family, Hilde Crevits, is taking a number of measures to make the allocation smoother and the payment, above all, faster.
Simplified procedure
Over the past few months, a team of medical experts with broad experience in the care of children and young people with a support need focused on a possible standardization of a limited number of diagnoses. The most common disorders in children and young people with a support need have a relatively predictable course in the longer term. They can be grouped or clustered up to five target groups. It concerns children and young people with ASD, with ADHD, type 1 diabetes, sensory impairments and intellectual disabilities. About half of all applications for health care allowance concern diagnoses that belong to these five target groups.
A simplified procedure has now been developed for these diagnoses, which means that the assessment of the support need is carried out more quickly and is valid for a longer period of time. In 4 of the 5 target groups there is no longer a need for the revision at the age of 6, 12 and 18 years. There is also no longer a need for a consultation with an evaluating physician. †dThis new simplified procedure should greatly reduce the waiting list with visible results by the end of 2022,” says Katrien Verhegge, Administrator-General Growing Up.
43 additional summer doctors
The entire processing will be done by team Zoë van Opgrown. In the first instance, this will be applied to all new applications for healthcare allowance for these specific 5 target groups. In the second instance, the application for the revisions of the existing files follows. In addition, an additional 43 summer doctors will be deployed this summer to strengthen the existing Zoë team. Together with the 20 evaluating doctors, they will be responsible for the evaluation of the files.
In a next phase, it will be examined how data can be collected even more automatically. There is already an automatic allocation of rights for the growth package and the school allowance. The ambition remains to be able to pay families a healthcare allowance even faster and to be able to work more automatically here too.