North Wales MS Mark Isherwood has called on the First Minister to ensure that staff in public bodies properly understand and implement their new duties under the Welsh Government’s Autism Code, after representing cases where children are denied Autism diagnosis by Flintshire’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).
Mr Isherwood raised the matter with Mark Drakeford in yesterday’s meeting of the Welsh Parliament during a question on mental health support for young people in Alyn and Deeside.
He said:
“I continue to receive casework where children are denied Autism diagnosis by Flintshire CAMHS because they have adopted effective masking and coping strategies in School, although they then meltdown at home.
“In these cases, the Council then blames poor parenting, with children even taken into care.
“Although the families in these cases are then forced to obtain expert independent diagnosis confirming their children are on the Autism Spectrum, the Council fails to identify and agree with them the support needed by their children and themselves.
“How will you therefore ensure that staff in public bodies properly understand and implement their new duties under your Government’s Autism Code? How will your Government monitor this?”
Mr Isherwood also asked the First Minister how his Government will respond to the recommendations in May’s Final Welsh Government Social Research Report, ‘Evaluation of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service In-Reach to Schools Pilot Programme’, including: ‘The Welsh Government should consider the feasibility of identifying and mapping the skills and competencies required by staff performing different roles within schools’.
In his response, the First Minister said that the CAMHS In-Reach pilot, which is to be extended to all local authorities in Wales, will ensure that staff have better training.
He said:
“Part of what the pilot does is to try and make sure that front-line staff, who are not themselves experts, as they can't be expected to be, in every aspect of a child's mental health or development - that those staff have better training, so that they are aware of the sorts of issues that Mr Isherwood has mentioned, and, where they feel that those needs require further and more expert forms of help, that they are able to make sure that those forms of help are quickly mobilised for that young person.”