Our Assessment Services

How to book

Our model is unique and may be different to other developmental assessment process. To ensure ARBRE integrated assessment is the right assessment model for you, please contact us on 3707 5477 to speak with our friendly ARBRE Admin Team who will talk you through the process and costings.

All Arbre referrals for our integrated Developmental Paediatric and Allied Health Assessment are triaged with a team member to ensure we get the right match of skill in your sessions to best understand your young person. Please be aware that there can be a delay before an appointment is booked.

Our Multidisciplinary Assessment Approach

The Arbre Integrated Assessment Package includes 3 direct sessions, 2 multidisciplinary case conferences about your child (including developmental paediatrician, psychology, occupational therapy, speech therapy and mental health social worker), and a diagnostic summary letter. The Arbre process will use a strength-based family approach.

We believe in honesty and being timely. Our goal is to share a diagnostic understanding as well as the best way to understand what is happening for your child and the best approach to future care.

Throughout the assessment you will meet with a developmental paediatrician and allied health team members. At each stage the team will discuss your child together to define a common diagnostic understanding and share our recommended approach. Our goal is to understand the challenges quickly so that positive changes can happen.

A Comprehensive Developmental Assessment

ARBRE Developmental Paediatrics and Family Therapies offer a diagnostic assessment package that is based on best practice guidelines for developmental assessment. The process is inclusive of direct and indirect multidisciplinary assessment of your child. As well as face to face assessment with your child and family, we will also spend non-direct time as a team gathering and reviewing collateral and discussing your child.

The final step in the assessment journey will include a multidisciplinary feedback session with a focus on sharing the understanding of your child’s development and the recommendations for the best next steps that will support your child and family moving forward.

Investing early in the understanding stage of a child’s development will often mean less difficult experiences for your child and you as a family and help real change to occur.

Step 1 – Initial Assessment

The Developmental Paediatrician and Allied Health Assessment session will be an integrated multidisciplinary assessment with your child and family, where we will explore biopsychosocial history, engage in a dynamic developmental assessment with the child/young person and develop a preliminary diagnostic hypothesis. The ARBRE ‘initial stage’ is inclusive of child, parent, and school questionnaires which the ARBRE team will facilitate and review. This along with the additional information provided by families and the assessment will help us to get to a diagnostic understanding quickly so can we plan together how to help and to support the next session.

Step 2 – Assessment Stage

There are variable options for this step and this will depend on the outcomes from your child’s first case conference with the Developmental Paediatrician and the allied health team.

Stage 2 assessment options may include:

Targeted assessment using a mix of standardised and dynamic allied health assessment to test initial diagnostic hypotheses.
Liaison with school, and other relevant stakeholders.
Clinical Questionnaires and/or collateral gathering.
Multidisciplinary discussion and diagnostic formulation.

Targeted allied health assessment, liaison with others involved in your child’s care and questionnaires will be undertaken based on early hypotheses with the goal of clarifying the hypotheses formed in the initial stage. All ARBRE clinicians are highly experienced behavioural and developmental clinicians who are accustomed to thinking broadly about children and young people and how it affects everyone in the family. The information gathered in the second assessment stage will be reviewed and discussed at a clinical formulation meeting with the ARBRE multidisciplinary allied health team, including our Developmental Paediatrician.

Step 3 – Feedback Stage

Diagnostic feedback session with Developmental Paediatrician and allied health clinician including recommended next steps.
Integrated Developmental Paediatrician and allied health diagnostic summary letter.

Following the Developmental Paediatrician and Allied Health Initial Assessment session all information, including targeted assessment, will be incorporated in a multidisciplinary discussion with the ARBRE team including the Developmental Paediatrician. Through this meeting a diagnostic formulation and consistent understanding will be made in preparation for the next session.

The third session will be a diagnostic understanding feedback session with the Developmental Paediatrician and allied health clinician, where diagnostic information will be shared with parents (and child/young person if indicated) and goals for intervention will be discussed. This session will use a neuro-affirming family-based approach to support understanding of the child /young person in their individual context.