Dr. Amir Niazi:

For the past two years, mental health has worked with our primary care and disability colleagues to develop a protocol for autism assessment and intervention. It is an integrated approach of having all those working together. In mental health that is, not only for children but also for adult patients with autism, how they will be assessed and how their care plans will be worked on. We are implementing that on two pilot sites at the moment, in CHO 2 and CHO 9. That will give us a lot of learning as to how we are implementing it, what kind of resources are required and what the access or referral criteria are. We will have learning from those elements and we have already started our work on the next phase of this, which looks at CHO 4 and CHO 7, to see what our learning is from the first two pilot sites and whether we can implement that learning into the next two sites we will take on. Then we will continue to do that. That is what we have done in the past two years. Mental health has worked with colleagues in disabilities and primary care in drafting it, designing it and putting it together, and now we are in a phase of implementing it.