A diagnostic assessment for autism requires input from at least two clinicians, who both contribute to the diagnostic process and report.

A diagnostic assessment for autism typically involves:

• A developmental interview with parents.
• A structured observational assessment of your child (face to face with one clinician).
• Gathering information from school.
• Depending on your child’s age, we may ask them to complete some questionnaires too.
• Additional assessment tools, such a standardised questionnaires or neuropsychological testing may be recommended. This is to give us a more detailed picture of your child’s relative strengths and difficulties and allow us to make more tailored recommendations for support.
• In very few cases, we may ask to go into the young person’s school for further observation, with your previous agreement of course.

Day of the assessment

As a general rule, diagnostic assessments for autism take approximately 3-4 hours, with both appointments (the developmental history with parents and the observational assessment of the young person) taking place in parallel. If this does not suit your family, the appointments can be booked on separate days of course. The diagnostic appointments are then followed by an hour-long feedback session with both clinicians to discuss the outcome of the assessment in detail.

If you opt to have both appointments on the same day, we can try to give you a diagnostic outcome on the day of the assessment. We can do this if you allow for an hour’s break after the assessment sessions and then join us again for the feedback session. Please note it may not always be possible to reach a diagnostic decision on the day and we may ask you for additional information-from yourselves, from school or from other involved professionals which will take some time to collect and review. We understand how difficult it is to wait for an outcome, but we also believe it is important to reach a diagnostic outcome we can all be confident in.

Fees

For all assessments, we will give you a quote for the work, once we have decided all the parts of the assessment and who the clinicians will be.