The Early Years

LADDERS is an interdisciplinary program designed to provide services in the evaluation and treatment of children and adults with autism, pervasive developmental disorder and related disorders. Our approach is unique in that we address the overall needs of the child and family members by establishing a multidisciplinary therapeutic and programmatic goals of the autistic individual. The LADDERS program is born out of a philosophy that developmentally handicapped persons deserve to be viewed as individuals, each with his or her personal patterns of talents and challenges. We strongly believe that each child merits the opportunity to be carefully evaluated and to receive the quantity and quality of services necessary to allow that individual to reach his or her maximum potential for independence and personal growth, regardless of economic, social and ethnic background. In achieving these goals, we have sought to enlist the expertise of highly trained professionals with outstanding skills in their respective fields. We bring these professionals together at LADDERS to work as team in assessing the needs of each child, recommending and providing appropriate interventions, assisting families to seek and obtain needed services, and providing ongoing support and advocacy.

In 1981, Dr. Bauman was hired, by Youville Hospital in Cambridge, to supervise the outpatient pediatric unit. In persuading the hospital administration to develop a full scale out-patient clinic that would see a child with any type of neurological condition, she expanded the patient population beyond the existing client base of children with cerebral palsy. At this moment, the seed of the eventual LADDERS clinic was born. In the early 1990's, Youville was beginning to experience some financial challenges, and faced with the prospect of having to reduce the quality of services provided to these children, it was elected to move the program. Thus, a new partnership with the Braintree Rehabilitation Hospital Network (BRHN) was established in the spring of 1995. It was an exciting time given that Braintree had 11 satellite sites devoted to the treatment of children. Unfortunately, shortly after the merger of the LADDERS clinic into the Braintree network, the clinic began to feel the pressures of the increasing cost-containments of managed care, and given that BRHN was a for-profit organization, there was no way to make up a financial short-fall with fund-raising efforts.

Subsequently, in January 1997, the medical component of LADDERS joined the Pediatric Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital. This affiliation with MGH benefits and enhances LADDERS in that the program moves to a non-profit environment allowing for philanthropic support, the program becomes part of an academic medical center where teaching the next generation of caregivers and researchers is possible, the program partners with an internationally recognized institution, and the professionals working with the program can easily interact and collaborate with other medical specialists.

Autism/PDD is now concidered a treatable disorder and many of these children can have and deserve a much brighter future than has been believed in the past. Their ultimate outcomes, however, depend heavily on providing early intensive interventions through therapists with a depth of expertise in their field. As a multidisciplinary clinic, our current goal is to provide services designed for each individual in hopes of finding that brighter future.