After four years, the Autism AIM – Mental Health Equity Project’s work is coming to an end. Funded by a grant from Comic Relief’s Change Makers fund, its aims were to help improve access to mental health services for autistic adults in West Yorkshire, support services to set up peer support groups and ensure physical settings were accessible.
The project also produced a wide range of resources about autism and mental health, which have been downloaded over 15,000 times since they were published.
Although its work has ended, we will still have those resources to download for free on our website. We will also continue to run monthly online mental health peer support groups, which have proved popular.
To show what the project did since launching in 2021, we worked with independent evaluator Damian Stevenson. Damian spoke to AIM staff and autistic adults about what happened, putting it all into a report.
Our successes
Since its launch, the Mental Health Equity Project has achieved quite a lot, including:
- Launching regular peer support groups for Leeds, Bradford and Craven, attended by hundreds of autistic adults
- Conducting sensory audits of mental health inpatient settings in West Yorkshire. This part of the project won an award in partnership with Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust in late 2023
- Training close to 300 staff, including advocates and social prescribers, with 94% reporting increased knowledge of autism
- Helping to influence change by implementing reasonable adjustment fields in clinical records
All the above and more are listed in the report, designed by Rachel Mayes. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has supported the project, including partners, peer support group members, former colleagues who contributed to resources, audits, groups and training and to Comic Relief for funding this much-needed work.
Download our report
To download a copy of the report in full, please click on the button below.
If you have any questions about the report and its’ findings, please email us at bradfordautismaim@advonet.org.uk.