Joanna Smith (ADHD Assessment In Children)

Who are you?

Hi, my name is Joe. Ask me anything about A-D-H-D-A-D-H-D assessments and how best to get support.

What is the difference between an ADHD screening, assessment and a diagnosis for a child?

So a screening would be the first part of your journey when it comes to an assessment. So that would be you speaking to either the senco in the score or you speaking to your GP and filling out some questionnaires. So those questionnaires will cover all three areas of A DHD looking at inattention, hyperactivity, and looking at impulsivity to see whether or not are there signs of A DHD. It'll we thinking that the things that your child's finding challenging or experiencing today, could they be a DHD. So that would be that screening part of the process. Then we move on to the assessment part of the process, so your child will be involved and that can be some relaxed back and forth chatting and questions between the child and the clinician can involve playing some games, whether or not they're online games. Being remote, I personally like doing a little treasure hunt activity if it is remote so they can run around their house finding different things. It's a really good way to look at things like following instructions and memory and seeing if they're really desperate to go and move out of their seat. And then as a parent, then you would be asked about the child's developmental history. You would be asked about how they're finding things day to day and whether or not these things could be explained by A DHD in that bit more in depth qualitative conversation. Then we'd move to the final part, which is looking at the outcomes that would be either a diagnosis of A DHD or not a diagnosis of A DHD. So we're putting together all of that information and sometimes we also ask for information from the school to see actually, are these things definitely explained by A DHD and nothing else. So we can either say yes to that or have a little look to see if there's any other pathways that we need to go down.

What is the process of a child's ADHD assessment?

So a child's A DHD assessment can vary depending on what provider you're going to. For LIOs, what would happen is that we would spend some time with your child having a chat with them about things they like, things they don't like, do they like school? Do they absolutely hate school? We have chat with them maybe about what are the things that they think the most important things about themselves and see how they find that and what they prioritise about themselves most. I personally always ask them about if they had three wishes to make anything better or make anything easier, what would they wish for? And see about where that lies them. Some kids have got some insight into their strengths and needs. Some kids will ask for 20 horses and 30 flying pigs, and that's fine too. Whatever the kid wants to chat about is not an issue. So we just have a bit of a chat. We look at that back and forth. We use our clinical skills as well just to see how they're getting on and observing their behaviour. And then depending on your child's age, will depend on how in depth we go into asking very specific A DHD questions. If your child's quite young, so maybe only eight or nine, we may just keep those questions brief, just seeing how they're feeling about things day to day. But if your child's a bit older, so if they're a teenager, we may go a little bit more in depth because what we really want to hear here is the child's voice and about how they're perceiving things, how they're finding things challenging or not challenging day to day, and where they'd like to seek that support. So that would be the young person's part of the assessment. And then for the parent, it would be looking at talking about developmental history in depth. We'd also ask about any difficulties throughout the pregnancy or throughout the birth. And then we would also look at asking, okay, how is school? How is day-to-day life? Like for you at home? What's brought you here really? And try and get you to explain your own words. Okay, I think this and that. So we can really bring out where those key challenges are day to day. And then we'd also go the very specific diagnostic criteria for A DHD. So looking at all of those three areas of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, you'll probably find your clinician to be quite nosy. We ask a lot of questions and we also ask a lot of questions about where we feel things are coming from, just so we can make sure we've got the right outcome for you and your child.

How can a diagnosis support a child with ADHD at school?

Key elements of an ADHD assessment?