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Comprehensive Developmental Assessment
In the early years of your child’s life, their brain is making more connections than at any other time in their lives. They’re developing communication, motor, social, emotional and thinking skills that they’ll carry with them for life. Often, these area's of child's functioning create a complex interplay that requires a more comprehensive developmental assessment to ensure your child is able to reach their potential with the most appropriate supports to help them.
About this assessment
While most children will meet their developmental milestones within a typical timeframe, there can be wide variations in when your child masters these skills. If you’re concerned about your child’s development, an early assessment can provide a comprehensive understanding of what factors are contributing to this delay and what strategies we can use to better support your child.
Designed for:
- Pre-schoolers (18 months to 5 years), primary school aged (6-12 years), adolescents (13-16 years)
- Diagnoses: Autism, ADHD, Intellectual Disability, Giftedness, Learning differences, Global Developmental Delay, Trauma-related Concerns and Speech or Language Delays
- Can provide further information about emotional difficulties, speech and language challenges, motor skill differences, sensory processing challenges, eating difficulties, sleeping problems, and social skill needs.
Early diagnosis = early intervention
The sooner we can pinpoint what’s going on, the sooner we can take practical steps to alter your child’s trajectory. We know that children who build skills in challenging areas at an early age are far less impacted as they grow up and their overall wellbeing is improved, too.
Early interventions means your family will be empowered with a better understanding of how to support your child replacing fear, confusion and frustration with clarity, confidence and certainty. Plus, an accurate diagnosis can support accessing funding under the NDIS Early Access Program (if eligible).
A comprehensive approach leads to better outcomes
Every child is unique and their experience of the world is shaped by their domains of functioning. For example, how a child builds social relationships depends on how they communicate and how they can manage their emotions and behaviours.
Our ultimate aim is to understand your child as a whole and provide an accurate diagnosis that allows us to provide the most relevant, appropriate and helpful recommendations to help you raise a happy, healthy child.
Meet CHAMPS
We know that cookie-cutter, traditional assessment methods don’t offer the best outcomes for kids. That’s why we developed ChAMPS (Child & Adolescent Multidisciplinary Private Service), our multidisciplinary team for the assessment of complex childhood development needs.
In our experience, developmental differences show up across several areas and a comprehensive assessment is the best way to understand if a child is neurodivergent and/or has complex needs to support their development. We ensure multiple clinicians from different disciplines are in the one location on the same day to observe and assess your child, with our multidisciplinary team working together to create a holistic plan for ongoing support to ensure your child reaches their potential.
Plus, we explore your child’s ability to complete daily tasks (from communicating to self-care and learning) and we offer tailored interventions and supports to help them achieve independence. These recommendations are aligned with how the NDIS assesses the support needs and funding allocations of individuals with disabilities or neurodevelopmental conditions, such as Autism.
This assessment at a glance
Initial screening
We do this by firstly asking you to complete a questionnaire that is broadly screening for strengths and difficulties across all domains of functioning (our Initial Assessment Questionnaire). If we need more information we will give you a call.
Developing an Assessment Plan
We then determine what assessments are most appropriate and will provide you with an Assessment Plan and Quote, with an explanation for why we are recommending these assessments.
Assessment
Once you are happy with our recommendations, we will organise the right clinicians to provide this assessment service (as a large health service we have a number of different options for assessing children and adolescents).
Feedback and Recommendations
At the end of the assessment we will provide feedback to you where we explain the outcomes of the assessment, how we are understanding your child and their needs, and we will provide you with recommendations for how to get the best and most appropriate supports for your child.
Throughcare
We will do our best to support you to find the help that has been recommended. Sometimes we can provide this for you but other times we may need to refer you to another service. Either way, we will support you through your journey in any way we can.
Book Now
Complete this brief Online Intake Questionnaire (2 mins) to speed up the process for booking your initial appointment at Marsden Health. We will contact you as soon as it’s complete.