Autism Update - Assessment Diagnosis and Support and Training

9 November 2020

COVID-19 has been extremely challenging for all and our local health providers have been working hard to ensure that the autism assessments for children and young people have been able to continue during this time. Whilst there has been disruption, providers have been working within the Covid restrictions to deliver services:

The East Cheshire Trust Autism Assessment Team (0-5):

• Have been able to adapt the pathway to enable the service to continue to see      patients whilst face to face assessments were not possible.
• The service have identified some patients who had sufficient observational reports and did not need an additional autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) assessment to reach an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis.

The Macclesfield Autism Team (5-18):

• Are continuing to provide adapted autism assessments by phone or video link,
• For those young people that were not able to manage the video observation assessment they are offered face to face appointments for assessments;
• The multi-disciplinary panels continue. 

The Community Paediatrics at Mid Cheshire Hospital NHS Foundation Trust working alongside the Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, Ruth, has been able to:

• Complete ASD diagnostic assessments as normal at this moment in time.
• Complete the normal standardised assessments that was at pre-COVID, including ADOS if needed, wearing full PPE , and socially distancing as much as possible.

Pre and post diagnostic support and training for parents and carers:                   

A range of pre and post diagnostic support and training for parents and carers continues, despite being disrupted during the COVID restrictions.

All our commissioned services, Space4Autism, ChAPS and BIRD are continuing to offer the programme, either online or face to face (when this has been possible). We will continue to work with all the providers to ensure that the support and training is meeting the needs of parents and carers during this time.

In summary local providers continue to work with their local communities to offer all the support they can during this very challenging time. Further details can be found on the Cheshire East Local Offer.