In May 2025 we admitted a young autistic man. 18 years old, lived in Services since he was 11 and who moved 10 hours away from his family for his last chance.
Over the past eight months, he has developed resilience and a growing faith in people who started as strangers – strangers who come to work each day determined to learn more, do better, and improve his life. It is my privilege to nominate the Springs EPC for Clinical Team of the Year.
He arrived with one of the most complex presentations our service had encountered ASD/ LD, significant trauma, and behavioural needs so acute that he could not safely share space with staff. Many services found this unmanageable. Our team asked a different question: not “can we manage this?” but “how do we truly help him?”
What followed was a complete redesign of what good care could look like. The team built a bespoke, low-arousal therapeutic environment – sensory room, private garden — designed around what he needed to feel safe.. It was never static. As he grew, it grew with him. Barriers came down, routines expanded, community access began. The space and the clinical approach evolved together, always in service of his progress.
Head-banging down to once a month, psychology engagement from 0% to 67%, and a young man who once couldn’t tolerate a person in his room now managing a nine-hour A&E appointment.
When he said “please don’t push me too much,” we listened. He shaped his own care at every turn, and that co-production was the engine of his progress.
But it is the nursing team I want to speak about most. The MDT set the goals, designed the framework, held the clinical direction – and then the nursing team showed up, every single shift, and did the hardest work of all.
They were the ones in the room with him during every distressing moment. Every spike of anxiety, every episode of self-injury, every time the world became too loud and too frightening, they were there. Not managing from a distance. Present. Sitting with him in it. Absorbing his distress without flinching, holding boundaries with warmth, and came back the next day and did it again.
This is a specialist autism-trained nursing team who did not just follow a care plan — they built a relationship, one moment of trust at a time. They learned his language, his rhythms, what helped and what didn’t. They became the human constant in a life with very little consistency. When He began initiating contact — 35 times in November alone — it was because he trusted the people who never left his side.
Behind all of it: Dr Mohammed as Responsible Clinician, Psychology, Speech and Language Therapy, and Occupational Therapy — in genuine alignment with a nursing team that turned clinical vision into lived reality, every day.
He is building trust – in others, and in himself. He is going home. This team made that possible, and they deserve to be recognised for it.
