Ms Jacqueline Campbell:

On how people access support and the various routes to that, generally in Scotland, the most likely place a parent looking for support would go to is the GP in primary care. After that, the pathway approaches being taken are changing. In the past, if someone pitched up looking for support for a child considered to be autistic, there might, for example, be a long wait. The parent might be directed to websites to look at but there would be a wait for the assessment to be carried out, which would normally be within CAMHS itself to determine whether the child met the criteria.

That has changed somewhat with the introduction of the specification to make it easier for people to access support and to ensure they access the correct kind of support. There will be children and young people who need that support through CAMHS and there may be others who, once assessed, may not get that support. The assessment might be carried out by the community mental health team as a step before CAMHS and a decision might be taken there, in conjunction with the family, about what kind of support the young person will need. As I said, where we are with that is that a number of different resources are available locally. If, for example, there are high levels of anxiety, as there can often be for autistic young people, some additional routes of support in the community, funded by the Scottish Government, provide an alternative to mainstream CAMHS supports, so there is somewhere else for both parents and young people to self-repair and get that support. That is a very positive development in Scotland.

I mentioned some of the additional supports that are more autism specific and which we have in place as a team. There is also the work I referred to called post-diagnostic support, although that is not the best term for it given it is not diagnosis dependent.

However, that is another way for people to receive support. That has been a combination of things. In the pilot stage, it has applied to children and young people, parents and adults. It provides, for example, one-to-one support or group sessions, particularly around autism, routes for people to access information about identity, what it means to be autistic and what kind of support you might need in life. There is a number of things there. I mentioned the advice line earlier as well. Those are examples of some of the routes.

There would be slightly different routes, obviously, for families where the child or young person has more significant needs. We often see that where children or young people also have a learning disability. We have well-established routes in Scotland for people to achieve support if that is the case. With learning disability, we also support a charity called Promoting a More Inclusive Society, which works closely with families who have children, many of whom are now adults, who have severe needs. They may have blind disabilities, physical disabilities and-or autism. We work with them too. That probably gives the committee a bit of a flavour.

Around workforce planning, as I mentioned, this is an area that we need to do a lot more on in Scotland. We have done some work. I would say it is smaller scale, to be honest. For example, in the national education health board in Scotland, we do work and we fund work for professionals in health around looking at profound disabilities and autism. It is about that neurodevelopmental-informed workforce. For example, NAIT has run training for health professionals that looks at cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, on our behalf. CBT, if delivered to autistic people, has to be adapted. We are trying to expand the knowledge of how to make those adaptations in order that that can go further.

We certainly see the need, as we do in many other areas, for a multidisciplinary team approach. I mentioned how we see that panning out in the future around the kind of professional roles that there might be. We will likely encounter in many areas of the workforce, for example, around mental health, issues around the availability of those professionals, the number of people that are coming through higher education, and people who are retiring and not being replaced. We would have a similar set of issues to those that Ireland has. I cannot give the committee a breakdown at the moment of how that would pan out among those different professional groups, but, certainly, as I say, we recognise that we need to do more work in respect of this area.

Deputy Ó Murchú mentioned assistive technologies. I have not really got a lot of information on that. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, is an interesting one in Scotland because the work around adult neurodevelopmental pathways originally came out of concern about adults with ADHD specifically not having support. That is why that work has then developed into ADHD and autism and then into a broader neurodevelopmental approach. Also, in Scotland, we would recognise that that is needed because there are gaps around support around ADHD. I cannot say an awful lot about that. We will see if we can come back to the committee on information about assistive technologies and how that might be made available. I do not know what the arrangements would be across local authorities for that.

Another area around technology - I do not know if it is of interest - for us, certainly, is more around housing and how we can use assistive technologies in housing to support people who may have additional needs. For example, that is a topic of conversation around the work that we are doing whereby we are trying to get people back to their local communities. These people may have been the subject of delayed discharges for a long time or they may have been accommodated in a out-of-area placement, that is, in a different area to their home area in Scotland or, in many cases, in England. In the context of the kind of housing that individuals sometimes need there, technology is certainly an issue. There have been some nice examples in Scotland through third-sector charities working with local health and social care partnerships where there were sorts of core and cluster-type housing being set up with assistive technologies.