"Completely disregarded and over looked"

We had been waiting for our child’s ASD appointment for 2 and a half years. Last year, the school had called to chase up and was told our child was ‘position’ 200 in the waiting list. Due to our child starting secondary school this year and expected to go to a main stream school when they are working at a KS1/2 level, we pushed for an appointment. We finally were told that they would call us back that very day with an appointment, which never happened. We had to call them in the end after another 3 weeks of being met by an answer machine. After being very irate on the phone due to not receiving the returned call we got an appointment for the very next week. When asked why we didn’t receive a call, we were told it was due to paperwork not processed correctly.

On the day of the assessment, we were left waiting for 25 minutes before being called in.

Our child was taken into a separate room for their assessment while we were asked to explain what we go through with our child on a day to day basis, behaver patterns/experiences, emotional difficulties, social difficulties as well as the very detailed speech and global learning delay diagnosis that was already provided to them by the school and pretty much detail every incident or mishap our child has gone through. It honestly felt like we were stabbing our own child in the back. After 2 hours of questions and explanations of what our child is going through, our child was brought back in while they went out and discussed our child’s assessment and our statements.

The assessors asked if we would like our child in the room while they went through their diagnosis which we said we were not comfortable with as our child is very sensitive and can get very emotional. Regardless, the assessors said that they prefer our child to be in the room during the diagnosis and was left in the room.

During the assessment, they stated that they did not witness any of the behavioural difficulties that we had stated or that the school had reported in their referral. They did comment on our child scoring very high on having very little to no Emotional or social awareness but this is not used in the diagnosis. (So why even check for this?)

We were told that although our child does not register on the Autism spectrum (in their opinion as many other healthcare and psychological professionals had said there are strong autistic traits), our child does require a high level of special needs in front of them!

When we got home, our child broke into tears as they felt like they let us down and though they made us look like liars as well as being called special needs. We have already had a period of time where our child was calling themselves stupid and useless which took us a long time to get them past and we are now having to go through this again because of the assessor’s comments.

We are appealing the decision and considering finding the funds to go private as we believe Newbury CAMHS have failed our child.