Parent Feedback Points Toward Co-Designed Public Autism Mental Health Services

A brief report published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders describes how feedback from parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can inform the continuous improvement of public child and adolescent mental health services. The study, led by Federico Cardelle-Pérez and colleagues, collected parental evaluations at the end of a psychoeducational group intervention and placed the observations within recent literature on participatory co-design of health services. The intervention was a psychoeducational group for parents of children with ASD.

According to the report, the results showed a high level of satisfaction with the intervention. Alongside the questionnaire scores, the researchers gathered subjective observations of interest from the optional comments. The authors suggest that these parental observations illustrate how parental input can guide iterative, user-centered improvements in public ASD services.

The report's broader argument concerns service planning. The authors state that service planning should necessarily involve the community, and they position the collected feedback as a practical example of how users of public services can participate in shaping them through repeated cycles in which the experiences of patients and families feed back into planning and delivery. The authors note the limits of what this brief report can establish.

They conclude that more research is needed on the most appropriate means to integrate the experience of patients and their families into a process of continuous improvement that a public child and adolescent mental health resource should undergo. The report presents a feedback collection exercise and a literature framing, not a tested model for implementing co-design across public systems. Several constraints follow from the study's design.

The evidence comes from parents who completed a psychoeducational group, using a satisfaction questionnaire and optional comments rather than a controlled comparison. Satisfaction scores reflect participants' subjective evaluations at the end of the intervention and cannot by themselves demonstrate clinical outcomes for children or families. The free-text comments were optional, so the views collected may not represent all families who took part.

Within those limits, the report offers a concrete illustration of a participatory practice: pairing a satisfaction measure with open-ended parental commentary at the close of an existing group intervention. The authors suggest that such feedback can serve as material for iterative, user-centered refinement of public ASD services, while emphasizing that more research is needed on the best methods for embedding family experience into ongoing service improvement.

Subject of Research: Parental feedback and user participation in the co-design of public child autism mental health services

Article Title: Brief Report: User Participation in the Iterative Co-Design of Public Child Mental Health Services

Article References: Cardelle-Pérez, F., Banacloig-Delgado, C., Muros-Cobos, N. I., Ortega-García, M. D., Andrés-Espallardo, S., & Leal-Hernández, M. (2026). Brief Report: User Participation in the Iterative Co-Design of Public Child Mental Health Services. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07587-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07587-8

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, co-design, parental feedback, psychoeducational group, child mental health, public services, client satisfaction, service improvement, participatory design, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Brief, Report