St Mary’s House
North Wing
2nd Floor
St Martins View
Leeds
LS7 3LA
Tom Crellin/
Contact Person:Anne-Marie Field
Contact No:0113 855 9772Our Ref:FOI-REQ-1055
2nd September 2014
Dear Mr Crellin,
Thank you for your correspondence received on 11th Augustrequesting information from our Trust.
Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 we are able to provide you with the following information:
1 – Does your trust have any specific policy regarding the diagnosis of PDA? If so, please enclose a copy of the relevant policy.
No, our Trust does not have such a specific policy.
2 – Does your trust have any policy that would discourage or restrict clinicians from diagnosing conditions not described in the ICD, DSM, NICE guidance or other similar documents? If so, please enclose a copy of the relevant policy.
No, our Trust does not have such a specific policy. The constraints upon a clinician will come from within their own scope of practice, codes of professional conduct and requirements within multi-professional team working.
3 – Please identify the team (or teams) that fulfill the role of the “autism team” as described in section 1.1 of the NICE guidance on autism diagnosis in children and young people (CG128). Please give the name of the team and their main postal address. If you have multiple teams that fulfill this role please indicate how the case load is apportioned between the teams (for instance by geographical coverage or age ranges).
Our Trust does not have a team dedicated specifically to the treatment of autism, however our multi-disciplinary team located at Lime Trees fulfil this role, as they help young people with difficulties such as low mood, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Further information about the team at Lime Trees can be found on our website at;
For more informationabout the team at Lime Trees, you can also download an information pack by clicking on the following link;
4 – Please state the total number of clinical staff in your autism team(s). Please include in this figure all clinicians that are contracted to provide a regular service as well as those directly employed by the trust.
As explained in our response above, we do not have a specific ‘autism team’. The staff team at Lime Trees includes: nursing staff, an occupational therapist, clinical psychologists, consultant psychiatrists, junior doctors, a social worker, a family therapist, a dietician, a physiotherapist and teachers. The service manager at Lime Trees oversees the running of both the In-patient and Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Lime Trees also has access to a mental health advisor for 16-18 year olds who is based at the Castlegate Centre in York. Additionally, staff at Lime Trees support young people and their families to access alternative services where such needs are identified.
5 – For the staff included in your answer to Q4 above please list any attendances at seminars, conferences and/or training sessions about PDA in the last five years that you have recorded. I do not need you to identify the individuals that attended; just the number of clinical staff that attended each PDA event will be sufficient.
Although clinical training sessions contain elements of PDA content, we do not hold specific PDA training sessions.
Whilst “external” training such as attendance at seminars / conferences etc. is recorded by managers or the people themselves after attendance at such events, to report this would require a physical search through individual staff files to obtain this information - a manually labour intensive and time lengthy process. As such, this is not information that we hold in a reportable format as we would need to manually search 3,858 staff files. * Please see the note below on the ‘appropriate limit’.
* Please note: the Freedom of Information Act imposes a statutory limit, known as the "appropriate limit" on the amount of time that can be spent on locating and extracting the information required to answer a Freedom of Information request. This limit is currently set at £450, which the legislation deems to be equivalent to 18 hours of staff time.
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit.
Where our Trust receives a request which is estimated to be above this appropriate limit, we can apply relevant fees and charges attributable to the processing of that request.
In estimating whether a request will incur charges, we will take into account the retrieval process covering the entire request. In view of our outlining that compliance with your request would involve a wholly manual / labour intensive and time lengthy procedure, it is our estimation that compliance with your request will exceed this appropriate set limit.
If you still would like to proceed with your request, please could you confirm this? Upon receipt of confirmation we will calculate the costs attributable to the processing of your request and upon payment, your request will be processed in full.
If you are not satisfied with our decision regarding your request, you have the right to appeal and should in the first instance write to our Freedom of Information Officer, who will escalate your appeal to the Executive Team FoIA Lead. Our maximum response time to conduct our review of your appeal will be 40 working days.
If you are still not satisfied you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, who oversees Freedom of Information and Data Protection in the UK.
Information Commissioner’s OfficeWycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
If there is anything that you need further clarification on, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Yours faithfully,
Anne-Marie Field
Information Governance Support Officer
Email:
/ A teaching organisation providing mentalhealth and learning disability services