Autism and Learning Disability Training: Healthcare Professionals
Debate between Mike Wood and Hannah Bardell(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Mike Wood
The hon. Lady is right, and if I may give a quick plug, the all-party parliamentary group has done some important work with the National Autistic Society on precisely the issue of autism, employment and education. I understand it will be published shortly and I hope it provides a focus for a future debate.
Hannah Bardell
Following on from that point, does the hon. Gentleman agree that people with autism and additional support needs have a huge contribution to make to our economy and society? As someone who has had a number of people on work experience, they have helped me to see the world in a different way. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will have seen “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”; when I went to see that in the west end, it was a turning point for me in understanding the world and a little window into how people with autism see it.
Mike Wood
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. That enormous employment gap is a tragedy in terms of not only the lost opportunities for those people directly affected, but the wasted opportunities for the many employers who could be benefiting from the skills of people with autism and other learning disabilities, and for wider society, which is losing the contributions that they can make.
Finally, I will touch quickly on the issue of mental health. Autism is not a mental illness, but we know that people with autism are much more likely to be affected by many mental illnesses, particularly anxiety-related illnesses, than the general population. We need to ensure that the new framework is properly embedded across mental healthcare as well as physical healthcare, so that our mental health services can ensure that people with autism get the proper services they need. Far too often, people with autism find not only that their condition means their mental health problems are not properly diagnosed at an early stage, but that, if diagnosed, their condition can interfere with their receiving the appropriate treatment in a way that might be expected elsewhere.
We must ensure that autism is one of the four clinical priorities right across the healthcare system and that the training our healthcare professionals receive reflects that. Only then can we start to address the healthcare inequalities that we see in this country and, hopefully, try to ensure that there are fewer repeats of the terrible stories we have heard this afternoon.