Son waiting 6 months for social communication assessment is that normal?

It took 18 months to get my son a diagnosis for ASD, and I expect it would have taken even longer if I hadn't made multiple complaints about the delays, inefficiencies and administrative incompetence.

May I suggest you contact your local PALS team (patient advisory liaison service) and ask them to find out the pathway being used for your son's SCD assessment. PALS may also have more luck at getting a response from CAMHS than you have - my experience was that 3 days after calling PALS an appointment letter arrived in the post!

If they are using the ASD pathway for SCD assessment then take a look at the NICE guidelines about how the process should operate: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg128/chapter/1-recommendations#autism-diagnostic-assessment-for-children-and-young-people.

In our case the referral was incorrectly routed through Community Paediatrics before arriving at the autism team. That wasted 6 months. There was then another 6 month wait for the autism team to decide to assess my son (when they were obligated to do this in 3 months). They trotted out the usual excuses of a lack of resources and excessive levels of demand for the service, but through a couple of Freedom of Information requests I was able to establish the real reason for the delay was that they were not complaying with the guidelines. Once they started to do so things sped up dramatically and also ended up reducing costs on a per child basis!

Also, consider making a formal complaint in writing. I sugegst you make this to your Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) rather than to the healthcare provider (which will probably be a local NHS trust). The CCG are the people who pay for the services and are responsible for provising them. My experience is they have no idea how badly their providers are doing and just accept all the excuses at face value.

But, they are one step removed and whereas the provider is likely to get defensive and do everything to protect its corporate reputation, the CCG can be more objective. With a sufficiently strong case of poor service the CCG can intervene and improve things a lot. They can also commission a different provider if things with the current one get too bad (as they did with my son's speech therapy).

Good luck with all this. Keep battling and things will improve; and please let me know how you get on.

It took 18 months to get my son a diagnosis for ASD, and I expect it would have taken even longer if I hadn't made multiple complaints about the delays, inefficiencies and administrative incompetence.

May I suggest you contact your local PALS team (patient advisory liaison service) and ask them to find out the pathway being used for your son's SCD assessment. PALS may also have more luck at getting a response from CAMHS than you have - my experience was that 3 days after calling PALS an appointment letter arrived in the post!

If they are using the ASD pathway for SCD assessment then take a look at the NICE guidelines about how the process should operate: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg128/chapter/1-recommendations#autism-diagnostic-assessment-for-children-and-young-people.

In our case the referral was incorrectly routed through Community Paediatrics before arriving at the autism team. That wasted 6 months. There was then another 6 month wait for the autism team to decide to assess my son (when they were obligated to do this in 3 months). They trotted out the usual excuses of a lack of resources and excessive levels of demand for the service, but through a couple of Freedom of Information requests I was able to establish the real reason for the delay was that they were not complaying with the guidelines. Once they started to do so things sped up dramatically and also ended up reducing costs on a per child basis!

Also, consider making a formal complaint in writing. I sugegst you make this to your Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) rather than to the healthcare provider (which will probably be a local NHS trust). The CCG are the people who pay for the services and are responsible for provising them. My experience is they have no idea how badly their providers are doing and just accept all the excuses at face value.

But, they are one step removed and whereas the provider is likely to get defensive and do everything to protect its corporate reputation, the CCG can be more objective. With a sufficiently strong case of poor service the CCG can intervene and improve things a lot. They can also commission a different provider if things with the current one get too bad (as they did with my son's speech therapy).

Good luck with all this. Keep battling and things will improve; and please let me know how you get on.