Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to reduce the time that people have to wait for a diagnosis of autism.

We are committed to ensuring adults and children receive a timely autism diagnosis in line with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance.

The NHS Long Term Plan was published on 7 January 2019. The Plan commits to improving autism diagnostic pathways in England and ensuring autistic people have access to high-quality care and support in the community. 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. This will be a step towards achieving timely diagnostic assessments in line with best practice guidelines.

The Department is determined to drive up performance on autism diagnosis nationally. To support this NHS Digital began formally collecting autism diagnosis waiting time data from mental health provider trusts for the first time through the Mental Health Services Data Set in April 2018. Data is submitted on behalf of autism diagnostic services, in line with issued guidance. The current plan is to publish a report after a year’s data has been collected and analysed, in September/October 2019. As this is the first time this data is being submitted, some work to improve its quality may be necessary.

The data being collected covers both adults and children and includes:

- The length of time people with suspected autism wait following referral for a diagnosis before an assessment is started (to compare with the 13 week NICE Recommendation);

- The number of people within the reporting period receiving an autism diagnosis and the time it took to get the diagnosis;

- Profiled information (gender, age, other recorded diagnosis etc);

- The number of autistic people seen by mental health services within the reporting period; and

- Referrals to NHS services due to autism diagnosis or because autism diagnosis not confirmed, or where no further assessment or treatment was appropriate.

In addition, the Department is developing guidance on autism and an accompanying toolkit to support local health and care commissioners with commissioning diagnostic and post-diagnosis services. The guidance will bring together existing guidelines, standards and best practice examples on how to commission effective, high quality services for autistic people. This will include setting out care pathways to support timely diagnosis of autism and effective post-diagnosis support services. We expect the guidance and toolkit to be available by this summer.