Autism: Diagnosis
(asked on 6th February 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 29 January 2020 to Question 6150 on autism: diagnosis, how his Department monitors the autism diagnosis process in the absence of data relating to waiting times for diagnosis.
The Department recognises the importance of timely and effective diagnosis processes and that is why we have introduced the first ever collection and reporting of autism waiting times data.
On 14 November 2019, NHS Digital published statistics that present the number of new referrals to mental health services for which the referral reason was suspected autism, as well as their waiting times to first appointment. These are experimental statistics and have been published by NHS Digital to involve users and stakeholders in the future development of the data, including work to improve the quality of the data. The data is intended to give average time to diagnosis, but it will take some time before that information is ready for publication. The data is available at the following link:
In addition, the NHS Long Term Plan has set out that over the next three years, autism diagnosis will be included alongside work with children and young people’s mental health services to test and implement the most effective ways to reduce waiting times for specialist services.