Do you have any Questions?
Do you have any Questions?
- Child Assessment – A Developmental History is carried out online with parents via Google Meet. This meeting will be with a Clinical Psychologist or equivalent professional. A separate face to face appointment with your child will then take place to carry out the ADOS and cognitive assessment.
- Adult Assessment – A Developmental History is carried out online, using Google Meet. This meeting will be with a Clinical Psychologist or equivalent professional. A separate appointment will then take place either face to face or online via Google Meet to carry out the ADOS, depending on your preference.
If you want us to consider PDA as a profile of autism, a full autism assessment with us will be required even if an autism diagnosis has already been given previously.
We will send them a report to complete and return to us.
- A developmental history is carried out online, using Google Meet, with parents (for child assessments) or the adult being assessed. Following this we can then carry out the ADOS (and optional Cognitive Assessment) face-to-face in either our Norwich or Henley-in-Arden clinic. The team responsible for managing the clinical diary will advise on availability once a request for an assessment is received by us.
- We can also offer the entire process online, but our preference is to carry out the ADOS face-to-face wherever possible.
During the Developmental History the clinician will confirm if any documents that you have would be helpful and ask you to send them in to our administrators.
If parents are unable to attend appointments together, we cannot offer additional or separate appointments. However, we can provide alternative ways for each parent to contribute information to the assessment, such as through questionnaires. All information and views provided are considered by the multidisciplinary team (MDT) when discussing diagnostic outcomes.
We expect the parent who makes the referral to share appointment information with the other parent where appropriate.
Additionally, as stated on the following NHS website – “Children under the age of 16 can consent to their own treatment if they’re believed to have enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment. This is known as being Gillick competent.”
We have an article in our blog that discusses ‘masking’ here.
The clinicians carrying out the assessment can advise on the type of therapy that may be appropriate following the assessment, and whether it is something we can offer. If it isn’t something we offer, we will try to help you find a suitable specialist if possible.
For further details of what therapy we currently offer, see our Therapy services.
Adult free screening can be found here.
Child free screening can be found here.
The Conners 4 questionnaire is an industry standardised screening tool and does not provide an ADHD diagnosis.
Please email your enquiry to [email protected]
Cancellation on the day of your booking would incur a 100% cancellation charge.
Should Help for Psychology need to cancel your appointment due to unforeseen reasons, then you will receive a 100% refund on the appointment we can’t provide, unless a suitable alternative booking date is supplied and agreed for your sessions.
However, our position is quite clear, and we advise the following:
If an assessment has been carried out utilising NICE Guidelines, by a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals, who are registered (such as with the HCPC), and with the appropriate experience and skills, (which is our approach), then local authorities would need to give a valid reason for dismissing a diagnosis following such an assessment. Also, it is important to establish upon whose say so that private diagnoses are not accepted. Many clinicians make this statement without foundation, and for a variety of reasons. If a clinician is claiming the local authority don’t accept the outcome of an assessment carried out in the manner described above, then they should be asked to provide written evidence. This should be in the form of a formal written ‘position statement’ from the local authority and/or NHS Trust, stating that they won’t accept a private diagnosis, and providing the rationale behind such a decision. We are happy to contact, and challenge, any local authority when we are provided with such written evidence of their refusal to accept a private diagnosis.
Furthermore, we have heard from many frustrated parents that some clinicians are claiming ‘PDA does not exist’. The question the clinicians who make this claim perhaps need to be asked is ‘Do you actually mean PDA doesn’t exist, or do you mean it isn’t recognised in DSM V?’ It is worth noting that in the original DSM only 106 disorders were mentioned. In the latest version, DSM V, around 370 disorders are listed, so clearly newly recognised disorders are being added over time. (Autism didn’t feature as a distinct diagnostic category until DSM version 3, but it certainly ‘existed’ in the lifetime of the original DSM and DSM II.)
Our position is quite clear:
If an assessment has been carried out utilising NICE Guidelines, by a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals, who are registered (such as with the HCPC), and with the appropriate experience and skills, (which is our approach), then local authorities would need to give a valid reason for dismissing a diagnosis following such an assessment.
Also, it is important to establish upon whose say so that private diagnoses are not accepted. Many clinicians make this statement without foundation, and for a variety of reasons. If a clinician is claiming the local authority don’t accept the outcome of an assessment carried out in the manner described above, then they should be asked to provide written evidence. This should be in the form of a formal written ‘position statement’ from the local authority and/or NHS Trust, stating that they won’t accept a private diagnosis, and providing the rationale behind such a decision. We are happy to contact, and challenge, any local authority when we are provided with such written evidence of their refusal to accept a private diagnosis
We let you take the lead with how far you want to take your enquiry. For example, if we offer you an assessment date and you don’t want to book an assessment, then we totally respect your decision.