Bill Colley

I have been working in the fields of education and care for four decades and for the latter half of my career specialised in supporting young people and adults with neurodevelopmental disorders. I have a particular interest in adapting settings to ensure that NDD ‘differences’ do not become barriers to inclusion and have applied this in both the independent and maintained sectors as well as at local authority level as an ASN manager.

I hold post-graduate qualifications in autism and SEBD and I am trained to administer a range of clinical assessment tools including the ADI(r), ADOS, and DIVA. I worked for 7 years on the Scottish Government’s autism strategy, and I am currently the Chair of the Scottish ADHD Coalition and Vice-President of the UK ADHD Partnership.

Close working with colleagues in the NHS (specifically CAMHS) has led me to conclude that the current crisis facing such services requires a strategic re-alignment of resources to ensure that capacity is built to match a surge in demand for both assessment and intervention, and for the last 10 years I have been involved in trialling early-stage assessment instruments to help inform triage and patient pathways.

I have been a rater for the Development and Well Being Assessment (DAWBA) for a number of years and have explored both its sensitivity and specificity across and range of psychological and psychiatric conditions, as well as testing the practicality of administering this instrument in larger population settings such as wait lists. I am particularly interested in how non-clinical professionals respond to the DAWBA and how timely detailed analysis can inform decision-making in educational, care, and domestic settings.

As a director of AISEE, I have had the privilege of working across professional domains with clinicians, patient advocates and social care professionals with the common purpose of improving lives for those affected by NDDs such as autism, ADHD and co-occurring mental health conditions. Latterly our work upgrading our daily living skills assessment and developing it into a standardised functional skills assessment has been in response to gaps in current practice and has indicated that needs profiling can ensure better and more targeted support where it is necessary to reduce duplication, waster, and incoherent care planning.

The implementation of the DAWBA alongside a robust functional skills assessment will, in my view, transform service provision at minimal cost but with maximum benefit to patients and to those with a duty of care towards them.