Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure suicide prevention services are autism-appropriate.

Alistair Burt

The information requested is not collected centrally.

Public Health England (PHE) published ‘Guidance for developing a local suicide prevention action plan’ in 2014. The guidance states the importance of developing multi-agency suicide prevention groups to ensure that local suicide prevention plans are informed by local intelligence and the needs of the local community. PHE is currently refreshing this guidance.

We welcomed the independent Mental Health Taskforce recommendation to ensure that all local areas have multi-agency suicide prevention plans in place by 2017.

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2012) stated that accessible, high-quality mental health services are fundamental to reducing the risk of suicide in people of all ages with mental health problems.

Last year, NHS England commissioned the world’s first Learning Disability Mortality Review Programme to support local areas to review deaths of people with learning disabilities and to use the information to improve service provision so that physical and mental health problems can be identified and addressed. The process is currently being piloted in the North East and Cumbria.

We have made monumental strides in the way we help manage conditions such as autism in this country and that is why we are working alongside people with autism, and their carers,

to make sure they have access to healthcare with adjustments made for their conditions. This is a focus of the Cross Government Autism Strategy which was revised in 2014 as Think Autism.