What to expect during your appointment
Some helpful tips for parents regarding your child’s assessment
My office manager, Kristin, will be your contact person for scheduling and billing.
Prior to your appointment, you will receive several emails. The first one will include a link that will take you to my Simple Practice website to complete forms about your child . The other emails will be questionnaires sent from my WPS website regarding your child’s everyday living skills. Please review them all in detail and complete them prior to our appointment.
Assessments are usually conducted in 3 parts (during one appointment): Interview of client history (during this time I observe the client in an unstructured setting; this also includes reviewing records), Psychological Testing (the more structured portion of the appointment; batteries are dependent on referral question), and Feedback (this is when we will discuss diagnosis and associated recommendations).
Diagnosis is not always clear after the first 2 parts of the process. In those cases, I like to do additional observations and/or consult with other professionals to acquire more data. Feedback will occur after these additional steps are complete. You can usually expect a full report of my findings sent to your referral source within 2 weeks of our feedback session.
Please talk to your child about coming into my office before our appointment to prepare them for what to expect. You may show them the photos on my website to give them a visual ahead of time. For younger children, you may opt to tell them they’ll be coming in to play. For older children who have more questions, consider explaining to them that we will be working together so that you can understand them better (how they think or how they learn) or so that you can get more ideas on how to help them when things feel hard. This is the phrasing I will use if your child asks me why they’re participating in different assessment procedures.