When you get in touch with us, you are likely to speak to Kerry. She is our team co-ordinator and she looks after the diary and sends out all the information you might need. She's really easy to talk to on the phone but we're equally happy to communicate by email - we understand that everyone communicates differently.

Once you have decided to go ahead, we will send you a list of the proposed dates for all of the appointments that you need to complete the assessment. This will tell you whether the appointment needs to be in-person or online for each different stage of the process.

We send out questionnaires in order to get some background information. This helps us to ensure that the assessments we use are the most appropriate ones. We often like to collect information from other sources, if you are happy for us to do this. For children, this might mean asking their education setting to complete a questionnaire too.

Your first appointment will be an online appointment with one of our clinical psychologists*.

We can find out what has brought you to seek out an assessment. We want to find out as much as we can about early childhood through to current life.
We might ask some questions that feel quite personal and probing, but we only ask questions that we need to to help diagnostically.

At the face-to-face appointment with our Speech and Language Therapists we use standardised assessments that are internationally recognised, such as the ADOS-2 to indicate whether the threshold for an diagnosis has been met. We may also use supplementary assessments to give us further information where appropriate.

For children, sometimes we also need to visit their education setting to observe them both in class and during break time. However, we often find that the written information we receive from the school gives us more than enough information. The teachers usually know the children so well, and observe them throughout the day and across the week, allowing them to give far more insight than we are likely to see in a short visit.

The multidisciplinary team (MDT) meet to discuss their findings and reach a consensus as to whether an diagnosis is appropriate given the information provided across the range of different sources. All clinicians must be in agreement for a diagnosis to be given.
Each clinician then writes their section of the report before it is edited together into one comprehensive document. This is always proofread by the team.

Members of the MDT will meet with you to discuss the outcome of the assessment, explain how this outcome was reached, and describe some of the things that were noted during the assessment process that contributed to the outcome. We keep this appointment relatively short (around 30 minutes) as, whatever the outcome, it can be emotional hearing this information.

The assessment report will be sent out to you through our secure client portal, and you will receive a notification when it is ready.
You will then have time to read through the details of the report.

After receiving the outcome during the feedback appointment, and reading through the report in your own time, it is not unusual to have many questions. This appointment is a Q&A format, which you can use to ask anything you need to about the assessment, report, outcomes or potential implications. We can also discuss further support that is on offer.

We don't believe in handing out a diagnosis (or not) and then leaving you to navigate the system on your own. We provide after-care support in the form of putting you in touch with other people at the same stage of the process, should you wish (depending on client uptake). We also offer ongoing speech and language therapy for adults and children where this is appropriate. We can also arrange further Q&A sessions with the team if other queries arise at a later date. We can signpost you to helpful sources for further information or support too.