Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank the Senator for her questions. I will quickly go through the issues she raised. She spoke about adult ADHD services. A pathway has been established for adult ADHD. It was developed on the mental health side of the house.

Work is now developing on child ADHD services. We hope that work will be done across the two clinical programmes for mental health and disability.

Work has been ongoing over the past year to develop a new protocol around autism. We will trial that protocol in four different CHOs, starting in January. The Senator also mentioned a couple of issues around diagnosis. It is important to point out that in compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, the disability services push a needs-based approach. As the Senator will perhaps appreciate, two people who could be classified as being autistic may have completely different experiences of autism and, therefore, the sorts of services and supports they need can differ quite dramatically. It is certainly the case that many people could identify different diagnostic categories and say that something should be developed specifically for those diagnostic categories. In line with best practice and the UNCRPD, we are trying to develop a needs-led approach so that the interventions are available considering what is required to support people, rather than by a particular diagnostic category.

The Senator also mentioned gaps in the children's disability network teams, CDNTs. In the past month, our human resources within the disability services have undertaken an audit so that we are aware of exactly what sorts of services are provided, as well as what sorts of gaps are currently in place across the CDNTs. That will be one of the rationales for allocating the new posts.

Mr. O'Regan mentioned the work on specialised services and the clinical programme. With all of our committee work on the clinical programme, we have lived experience involvement in that. The specialised services are being developed so that the CDNTs are supported when there are particularly challenging issues. For example, full expertise may not be available on the teams. Importantly, that expertise is going to in-reach to the teams, rather than referring than somebody out of the teams and creating a logjam elsewhere. The CDNTs are a specialised service. There will be further specialised support on a tiered level to in-reach, to allow the CDNTs to be as effective as possible and to ensure that the person who is receiving the service is getting the service from the same people rather than being shunted from one place to another.