Why did you apply for the Autism Inclusion Award?

The department's decision to sign up to the award was inspired and driven by patient feedback and by personal experience of staff with autistic family members. The Inclusion framework was incredibly helpful, supporting developments such as adapting standard operating procedures, encouraging patients to disclose autism, and developing social stories for procedures and other visual supports for accessing the hospital. They also appointed autism champions and continue to build links with partners such as schools, National Autistic Society branches and so on. 

The team found some areas more challenging to implement than others such as updates to the ICT systems to be able to filter hospital passports and to flag disclosure on the system; however, they got this up and running.

The hospital has seen benefits all round including:

• For the patients and their families: who had an experience that was better adapted to their needs. There has been a shift where autistic patients, who historically may have been difficult to assess due to distress and difficulty regulating in a busy environment, are now much easier to assess and treat because of these small adjustments.

• For the staff: who had better quality interactions with patients who were able to feel comfortable and less stressed.

• For the hospital: as these patients used less resource,it takes less time to make an assessment and reduces diagnostic overshadowing (when the symptoms arising from physical or mental ill health are misattributed to a person’s autism or learning disability, leading to delayed diagnosis or treatment).