Issue - items at meetings - Autism - services for children and young people

41.1         Alison Nuttall, Strategic Commissioner, CYPT and Tom Hook, Head of Scrutiny, gave an update of what had happened with regard to the services for children and young people with autism.

41.2         CAMHS had sent parents and carers a questionnaire to assess satisfaction levels with services that were being provided. Unfortunately only a small number had been returned – 10 from approximately 80 which had been sent out- which meant that it was not possible to carry out detailed analysis of the results. However the available information about the results could be found at 3.7 in the report.

41.3         Comments and questions included:

Ø      It was not really possible to decide about user satisfaction on the basis of only ten responses. This seemed a very small number of responses, given that Amaze has a database which could be used to contact a much higher number of parents and carers of children and young people with autism.

Ø      There had been various scrutiny reports and panels looking at autism for over 14 years. It was a key issue for the city and needed to be resolved.

Ø      Were surveys the best way of gathering realistic responses? What was put into place to ensure that they were sent to all service users?

Surveys were sent to all users, and responses were sent back directly to the scrutiny team to minimise the likelihood of any responses being mislaid.

The committee then moved on to the next panel request before deciding whether to take this further.