October 2026
What is your current role?
Beccy is a speech and language therapist and Shannon is a clinical psychologist.
We work together in the autism assessment team, where we meet children and young people and their families.
Tell us about a typical day
During an autism assessment, Beccy will watch a child play, looking at their strengths and differences in communication, interaction, interests and behaviour. At the same time, Shannon will talk to the family about their child's development. We will then discuss with each other whether an autism diagnosis would help explain the child's strengths and needs before giving feedback to the family.
What's the best thing about your job?
Working in a multidisciplinary team (a team that is made up of people who work in different health professions). It's great to build a shared understanding of each child and identify the best ways to support them and their family.
What are you most proud of?
The psychology team run a parent group that supports families with their child's emotional regulation and behaviour management while they are waiting for an autism assessment.
During a session, a member of the speech and language therapy team will talk to families about how they can support their child's communication.
Delivering this group together helps us make sure we're addressing all of a child's needs and can equip their families with information and practical strategies from multiple professional perspectives.
We have also recently teamed up with the occupational therapy team to support this group, after receiving feedback from parents and carers that they would like to understand more about how to support their child's functional behaviour and understand their sensory needs. We hope that bringing together the expertise from 3 different disciplines will help to meet the needs of families who are waiting for assessments.
What are you working on at the moment?
Our team is working to make sure that autism assessment reports are more integrated across the multidisciplinary team and are written in a neuroaffirmative way. Neuroaffirmative care means that we see neurological differences as natural variations of the human brain rather than disorders that need to be fixed.
This means our reports are more child- and family-centred, focusing on the child's strengths, needs and preferences, which we hope in turn will mean professionals will be able to better understand and support them.
What's next for your team?
We're working on increasing patient and public involvement in shaping our services before and after diagnosis. We want to make sure that the voices, experiences and needs of young people and their families are central to how our services develop. This will help us to make our support more accessible, responsive and meaningful.
Thank you to the children and young people who have so brilliantly illustrated our blog pages.