Some of Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership’s (HSCP) health visitors have been taking part in intensive autism training. 

Health visitors are specialist community public health nurses (SCPHN), registered midwives or nurses. They specialise in working with families with a child aged 0 to five to identify health needs as early as possible and improve health and wellbeing by promoting health, preventing ill health and reducing inequalities.

Health visitors in our HSCP’s North East team in Glasgow were the first to take part in this quality improvement work to help them increase their knowledge, confidence and skills to support families with neurodivergent children, at the earliest opportunity. Currently, there is no consistent, formal training for health visitors or family nurses in relation to autism and other neurodiverse differences. 

Mags Simpson, Service Manager, North East Locality said: “This improvement work, which ran from 2022 to 2023, has involved a full health visitor team participating in intensive autism training. These staff are now using this training and changing their practice to better support children and families with autism and other neurodiversity. 

"The training was developed by Glasgow City HSCP Autism Resource Centre (ARC), and is being further developed in partnership with NHS Education for Scotland (NES). This is now about to be tested in three other health visiting teams in Glasgow and will be rolled across the city if successful.

“The aim of the project is to increase practitioner knowledge, confidence and skills in supporting families with neurodivergence. It also aims to equip parents to understand their child’s differences, move towards acceptance and be able to adapt to their child’s needs as they grow and develop. There’s real potential to share this across services, and we’re keen to share our learning as wide as possible.”

Feedback from parents has been positive. Comments include: “Thank you … you listened and supported me, I now see the difference between a melt-down and misbehaviour” and “I feel more confident, I finally have an understanding of autism.”