Partial statistics on waiting times for people in contact with autism services have been published today by NHS Digital.
The Autism Statistics1 report includes data on the number of new patients referred for suspected autism within the reporting period and waiting times for the first appointment (in weeks)2.
These experimental statistics3 are undergoing evaluation and should be used with caution as they do not capture all patients. In addition, information is based on total submissions for England and at provider level, but not all provider organisations are submitting data4. Work is ongoing to establish the number of organisations who should be submitting autism data.
A number of other limitations, including around the complexity of recording autism diagnoses and referrals, and other data quality issues are explained within the report.
The data has been published so that users and stakeholders can feed back on their suitability and quality to assist in their development, in order to improve the dataset over time.
Today’s publication includes statistics for the first three quarters of 2018-19, with breakdowns by age, gender and ethnicity.
This information is collected from the Mental Health Services Dataset5.
ENDS