Ms Jacqueline Campbell:

First, on the situation around child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and waiting times, we certainly did have the same situation in Scotland and that has not completely disappeared. Obviously the specification I mentioned and the money that accompanied that is being used to drive down waiting times. Certainly, it is also a very common situation in Scotland to have long waiting times of two years or more for a more formal diagnosis. That is what the direction of travel around the specification and the money attached to that is intended to address. I do not have them in front of me but we can probably provide the committee with the latest waiting times statistics which have just been released and show the improvements around that which are quite heartening.

The Deputy mentioned employment. We might need to follow up with him about unemployment because it is my colleagues in employment who lead that work. I can say a little bit from our perspective about the kind of work that we have done with them across government, what we are recognising as the issues, and where we think we want to be with it. Like education, employment is an issue. If you speak to an autistic person, being supported to be able to access employment and to be sustained in employment is one of the concerns. If we look at the figures in Scotland for people with what is classed under disabilities, we have a disability employment gap. There are plans around dealing with this and we have been working with our employment colleagues to ensure that people with learning disabilities and autistic people feature in the work that is designed to reduce that disability employment gap. What we find is that the people who are at the very bottom are people with learning disabilities where the employment is really extremely low. I think this is less than 20%. With autistic people, it is around 30% but is still pretty low. We know that one of the things that works consistently with employers is to have schemes around supported employment. There are different things that we would advocate and that the Scottish national autism implementation team, NAIT, would advocate as well. There is supported employment and formal schemes at one end. However, there is very much a need to ensure that the support around, for example, the autistic person, is joined up if they are in employment. Therefore, if there is a crisis or a breakdown in communication, there is an ability to work with the person to resolve that. Our understanding would be that employment for autistic people can often be difficult because even if they are supported at the beginning, it is then withdrawn and people are not able to come back into that support when they need it. One of things that NAIT is interested in and has looked at is how that support is joined up. Somebody may need an employment with the support that they might get from their health professional, for example, and how do people communicate in that multidisciplinary way when that person needs the support, and recognising that this might come in and out. There is still a lot of work to do on that in Scotland.

We published a report on supported employment last year and that piece of work was chaired by Charlie McMillan who heads up a Scottish organisation that we work with along with our partners with learning disabilities. That piece of work included a number of recommendations about how Scotland should move forward on supported employment. The Scottish Government accepted those recommendations and we are working on a plan to take those forward. That will tie in to the wider work that is being done around employment. We have policies such as one called No-One Left Behind which are meant to tie all that together. There is a piece of work that is being done around all of that which is vital. There is also mainstream employment work, there is a public private partnership with employers, and there are a lot of employers who are working directly with the Scottish Government on some of these issues through that partnership. Those are sort of key elements and we would be happy to provide a follow-up with additional information about all this.

The Deputy also mentioned that we are aware there is a need to train the workforce. That is really critical actually and it is at the heart of a lot of what we need to think about. For example, if we look at primary care and the doctors in this setting, the expertise people have around dealing with somebody with a neurodivergence could be quite small. They may not have been specifically training about that and we have had a lot of feedback through the work we have done with autistic people about experiences being really difficult when people such as GPs or whoever they are dealing with around health and social care do not understand how to relate to them. We pick that up in a number of different ways. We work to deliver formal training. That is something we need to increase, if anything. We support some of that. We are working with NAIT to understand some of the issues around the workforce and we will certainly be doing that as part of our work on adult learning development pathways. I will ask Ms Kinross to say a little bit about the work we are doing with autistic people around mental health because that brings in some of these issues around understanding.