Pawel Jaskolski

Alongside his clinical work he has held senior leadership roles including Hospital Clinical Director and CQC Registered Manager, bringing an unusually strong grounding in patient safety, clinical governance and quality of care to every assessment he undertakes.

I've worked in mental health for 20 years, starting as a support worker before qualifying as a mental health nurse and later as an independent prescriber. That route through the profession — frontline care, then team leadership, service management, and eventually roles as Hospital Clinical Director and CQC Registered Manager — shaped how I practise. I've seen services from the inside at every level, including services that were struggling and needed rebuilding, and it left me with a deep respect for what good, safe, thorough care actually requires.

For the past three years I've focused on neurodevelopmental assessment, and I've now completed over 2,500 ADHD and autism assessments. I'm trained in ADOS-2, ADI-R and DIVA-5, and much of my work involves people with complex presentations — those with co-occurring mental health difficulties, or whose difficulties have been misattributed for years to anxiety, depression or personality difficulties rather than recognised for what they are.

I have a particular interest in assessing women who mask. Autism and ADHD often look different in women, and the strategies people develop to cope can be so effective that they conceal the very difficulties that need identifying. Many of the women I assess have spent decades sensing that something didn't fit, without ever being offered an explanation that made sense of it. Getting that assessment right matters enormously.

My approach is to take a full picture: developmental history, mental health, relationships, education, work and how you manage day to day. Not a checklist. Being a prescriber means I can also think about treatment and joined-up care rather than handing you a diagnosis and leaving you to work out what happens next.

What drives me is the clarity people gain from a good assessment — the reframing of a life that suddenly makes sense. Outside work I'm usually with my family, travelling, running, lifting, or training Krav Maga.