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Lived experience, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Kate Lambridis turned a spreadsheet about her children’s health into an advocacy app
In short
Once her children were diagnosed autistic, doctors fobbed her off, Kate Lambridis told Think Autism Sydney in May 2025. Her answer was to turn lived experience into data patients could take back into the consulting room.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Kate Lambridis described the moment her children’s medical care changed. Both were diagnosed autistic at around the age of two, she told a panel at Think Autism Sydney on 31 May 2025, and both had other health problems. “I found it incredibly difficult with doctors because the minute they had that label,” she said, and from then on it was very hard to advocate for them about anything she raised. That included, she said, a blood test with a clear marker, iron that was very low.
Her children had intense regressive periods after they got sick, losing skills they had gained. She described watching a child who could speak lose speech, regain it and lose it again. The family could see a pattern, she said, and “we were just being fobbed off by doctors”. So she began keeping records. “So I started in a spreadsheet tracking what I was experiencing,” she said, along with the different things the family was trying to improve the children’s quality of life. She said the spreadsheet helped her daughter come out of those medical cycles.
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Sources the story draws on
- Human Health raises $8.5 million to fix broken healthcare systems (opens in a new tab), Forbes Australia (Anastasia Santoreneos)
- Barriers to healthcare and self-reported adverse outcomes for autistic adults: a cross-sectional study (opens in a new tab), BMJ Open (Doherty, Neilson, O'Sullivan, Carravallah, Johnson, Cullen and Shaw)
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