Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of young people with autism placed in secure beds in hospitals since October 2015.

The Assuring Transformation (AT) dataset provides data on the numbers of people with a learning disability and/or autism receiving inpatient care commissioned by the National Health Service in England. The AT dataset does not cover other secure settings such as young offender institutions or secure children’s homes.

According to the AT dataset, the number of inpatients under the age of 18 with autism in a secure hospital ward between 1 April 2018 and 31 March 2019 was 70.

The following table shows the number of inpatients under the age of 18 with autism in a secure hospital ward by year, from 1 October 2015 to 30 September 2019, according to the AT dataset.

Note:

The Assuring Transformation collection covers England, but includes patients whose care is commissioned in England and provided elsewhere in the UK. These figures represent the number of patients who are receiving inpatient care at the end of each month. Figures have not been revised with more recent information, but show the position at the end of each month as extracted from the system at that time.

Values have been rounded to the nearest five to minimise disclosure risks associated with small numbers.

Some patients have not been formally diagnosed with either a learning disability or autism but remain in the collection as they are understood to fall under one of these categories and as such were returned by data submitters.

The above table includes patients who are under 18 at the start of the reporting year but may have turned 18 during the year.

Inpatients may appear across more than one year.