Ms Suzanne Kinross:

We went to autistic people and asked them what their priorities were and what they needed support with most. During a survey of those responses, the strongest message of need coming out was support for mental health, obviously on the back of the pandemic. With that, the biggest thing within the mental health realm was access to the services. We set up two subgroups that are autistic-led and we called these people drivers because they are effectively in the driving seat as to pushing the work forward.

One work stream is looking at autism-informed services, and that includes how we can implement training into those points of contact around mental health professionals. We are putting training in place through our vehicle, NHS Education Scotland, NES. They have a series of courses within their model. That is fully accessible to existing staff with continuing professional development and other mandatory training they may take on as they move into certain posts. The preference is that we get to a level where, depending on what a person's work involves, he or she will be at either an awareness level, an informed level or a more expert level, depending on that person's exposure. Various work is happening there. We also are pushing into training for new staff, for example, for GPs and new doctors.

The other work stream, which had similar thinking about that point of access, wanted to take forward specific work on GP practices. That has expanded into the first point of contact if a person has a mental health issue. That might be a matter of calling our NHS 24 service, which is a 24-7 call centre that a person can ring for support, and trying to look at different ways to access that, such as chat functions, so that it is not phone call driven. There is now a mental health hub within that whole thing. It may be the case that you are phoning because you cut your finger, or you may be directed to something specific around mental health issues. Within that team, we are putting training in place for better autism-informed staff. There is an appetite within those services to do that.

The other point of contact is the GP, the helpline or the ambulance service. We are working with the Scottish Ambulance Service to try to work with their staff. Autistic people have said that a barrier to them seeking help and gaining support is that preliminary access point. Those are being led by autistic people. The outcomes from that are that we are looking to produce some resources such as videos, posters and different assets to explain the autistic journey in, for example, a GP service. For example, this is a matter of making sure that the receptionist understands what it is like for an autistic person to try to be on the phone, to wait on the phone, etc. It is trying to bring a level of awareness to all the different elements of staff. The resources will come out of that. We are very interested in how that is progressing. The Minister met with the autism groups and there is a similar channel of work stream for people with learning disabilities. She heard directly from them recently. She is very supportive of keeping that work going and looking at what resources will come out of that.