This week has been Neurodiversity Celebration Week and if you don’t know about this then please have a look at some of the events that have been taking place across the country. Next week (27 March – 2 April) is Autism Acceptance Week so look out for the stories and reports that we share on social media about our work.
About six months ago I joined the West Yorkshire neurodiversity team as one of the SROs. This is an exciting opportunity to work with a fantastic team of people across West Yorkshire to improve services for people who are neurodivergent. Those involved include people with lived experience, NHS, Social Care, Education and voluntary sector colleagues. I hope that covers everyone and I haven’t missed anyone out!
I have to confess I do have a personal interest in neurodiversity, I have a daughter with ADHD and dyslexia, a nephew with quite profound ADHD and a niece who is autistic. They have each gone through a unique journey to adulthood with different and yet similar challenges. As young adults they continue to have different challenges, but my niece and daughter are finishing degree programmes while my nephew continues to struggle with managing his ADHD. Getting to the point of diagnosis for each of them was long and protracted with lots of unhelpful interactions with education, social care and NHS professionals. Sadly, ours is not a unique situation with many people with similar and more negative experiences to ours. I have a passion and a drive to improve the system as do all the fabulous professionals and people I have the pleasure of working with on this programme. So please indulge while I outline the work, we are doing in the West Yorkshire Neurodiversity Programme.
We have started by undertaking a deep dive into services across each of the five places in West Yorkshire to understand the services they offer, the challenges they have in providing these, such as how many people are waiting for assessment, what workforce they have available, what people want from a service, what is missing and other questions. We had over 250 people in total from across West Yorkshire involved in the gathering of information through a range of events. The deep dive told us that:
- there are differences in the services for people leading to inequalities in the system dependent on where you live
- increased demand for Autism and ADHD assessment exceeds available capacity within the local NHS assessment services, leading to long waits in most providers:
- 12,741 autism and ADHD referrals were accepted in WY (April 2021 – March 2022)
- There were 140,000 people waiting for an autism assessment nationally in December 2022, this is an increase of 40% in a year
- there is a lack of pre and post diagnostic support
- there are barriers to accessing services, training needs for staff and volunteers, and reasonable adjustments and adaptations to mainstream services for people who are neurodivergent
- we don’t measure services’ activity and outcomes in a consistent way so we cannot benchmark and measure what good looks like
- funding within the NHS for Neurodiversity is not ringfenced and is often available on a non-recurrent basis making long term planning difficult
- we have insufficient appropriately trained workforce across most professional groups and this position is not likely to change in the short to medium term given the challenges nationally with vacancies across the mental health workforce
Sadly, none of the information we gathered was a surprise to us, so to keep us focused on what is important we developed these ambitions:
- to have appropriately resourced Autism and ADHD services, providing value and sustainability
- to have a consistent approach across West Yorkshire to address inequalities
From these ambitions we have identified these priority objectives to focus on for the next year:
- to improve consistency in neurodevelopmental services, reduce wait time and barriers to access
- to improve the availability of person centred, needs led, holistic support
- to implement the ‘Right To Choose’ agenda consistently across West Yorkshire
- to continue to embed co-production in the neurodiversity review, working with people with lived experience and professionals to create shared perspectives and learning to shape services
The consistent theme throughout each of these workstreams is to continue to embed co-production, working with people with lived experience and professionals to create shared perspectives and learning to shape services.
As you see we have our work cut out, but we are optimistic we can achieve our ambitions. Neurodiversity Week is an important event that helps raise the profile of Neurodiversity and we hope to be able to lobby local and national leaders to continue to raise the profile and priority in addressing the challenges in Neurodiversity services. We will continue to report on and share our work over the next year – watch this space.
Hello, my name is Nazreen Iqbal and I’m the Health Inequalities Lead for Stroke in the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Integrated Stroke Delivery Network (ISDN).
This week we have been celebrating becoming the first Partnership of Sanctuary in the country for going above and beyond to welcome people seeking sanctuary into West Yorkshire. To mark the achievement, dignitaries and other special guests including council leaders, people with lived experience and representatives from community organisations gathered at an event at The Art House in Wakefield on 16 March 2023.
Jeff Morgan, 
Those attending were tasked with thinking about how we embed trauma informed approaches in the work place, identifying the best ways of providing support, particularly with children and vulnerable people and looking at how we maximise the effectiveness of our interventions.
