Innovative care: Developing an autism pathway within psychiatric liaison

Autistic people are more likely than neurotypical peers to suffer from a range of physical health conditions, meaning that they are more likely to present to physical health hospitals, have a longer length of stay and poorer outcomes. The range of barriers they face across the lifespan in accessing good quality healthcare, combined with the greater prevalence of mental health difficulties in this population, suggests that they are also more likely to come into contact with Psychiatric Liaison teams (PLTs) during hospital contacts. As such, and in the absence of existing literature to explicitly explore these phenomena, particularly for older autistic adults, practice-based evidence is relied on across PLTs and wider hospital colleagues. Within this article, I summarise the sparse existing literature within this area and present the development of a PLT autism pathway for autistic adults across the lifespan within one NHS trust in the north-east of England.