Fife steps up bid to cut two-year wait for autism diagnosis

Councillors on the region’s education and children’s services, health and social care scrutiny committee have heard about various initiatives which aim to alleviate the pressure on services and cut down on the number of professionals involved in assessments.

Currently children could be referred to several different neurodevelopmental services for assessment or advice, and Fife’s waiting list for an autism diagnosis stands at around 1100 after COVID-19 affected the ability to carry out face-to-face assessments.

While that is still below the 1500 average for Scottish health boards, Fife is taking a pro-active approach to improving the situation still further by developing an early intervention training programme to support neurodevelopmental issues in west Fife - with a £200,000 funding request into the Scottish Government for that purpose.

Seven new members of staff, filling speech and language and clinical psychologist posts, should also be in post by April, which will more than triple the current size of the team.

Their first priority will be to reduce the waiting lists for child assessments and manage the 42 new referrals or so per month currently being received.

Maria Lloyd, head of education and children’s services, explained: “We’ve got a lot of very anxious families because of the waiting time for an autism diagnosis.

“Over the last two years, COVID has affected people with additional needs more than it’s affected other families.

“We’re not pretending we’ve got all the answers.

“What we’re trying to do is reassure parents there are other ways we can support their young person.

“We know from research and Fife data that a child may display developmental symptoms associated with different conditions which can be confusing for parents and professionals.

“Multi-disciplinary assessment often means one child has multiple appointments with different professionals for one assessment.

“If a presentation is unclear, or indicates comorbidities, multiple assessments with different teams may be required, leading to replication of information gathering.

“For many children it may be unclear initially which service is the most appropriate, or even whether referral to a neurodevelopmental service, as opposed to other services, such as CAMHs for example, is necessary.

“This can lead to families either waiting for unnecessary assessments or multiple referrals being made.

“Going from one pathway to the next potentially wastes time and resources.”

The early intervention training programme, if funded, will be piloted in two west Fife clusters, each with one high school and an associated primary and early years centre identified via data held by the education service and discussions with schools.

West Fife has been selected as this has the largest demographic and therefore the highest diagnostic figures.

Labour councillor Altany Craik, who is the parent of a grown-up child with Aspergers, described the process until now as “too laborious”.

But he added: “We didn’t get it, we’ve taken too long, we’ve under-resourced it but we’re now moving in the right direction.

“It’s better late than never.

“I want to see the pilot in west Fife work so we can get it across the rest of Fife.”

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