During the assessment we will ask you about the challenges you are experiencing, as well as asking questions about your childhood, education, family life and general physical and mental health. For children and young people, we will also ask school to complete some questionnaires and provide detailed feedback relating to the child’s experiences in school.
We will also complete a standardised assessment known as an ‘ADOS’. This standard for the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. There will be two people present from The Aspen Clinic. During this assessment, we will ask you some questions and may get you to complete some tasks. We will take some notes on the ADOS forms to record your responses to questions and tasks. There aren’t any right or wrong answers or ways to do the tasks, so please don’t worry about getting anything wrong!
One of the purposes of the ADOS is to observe how you interact and communicate with others and your unique way of completing a task.
The ADOS is scored, and this is considered alongside all the other information we have from your assessment, including all the forms you or your family or carer have completed.
We want to make sure that a diagnosis of autism is accurate and meets NICE guidelines to provide a high standard of care. This means we will discuss all the assessment information with the multi-disciplinary team (MDT), a team of healthcare professionals with different expertise, before we give you a diagnosis of autism. This also allows us to consider what support we can offer.
After the MDT meeting, we will be able to tell you if we can give you a diagnosis and the reasons why. It is important to remember that a negative diagnosis is still a diagnosis. We can also tell you more about the support available from The Aspen Clinic and other organisations. The MDT meetings are weekly, so we won’t keep you waiting long for an outcome. We will then send a report out to you by email or post. With your permission, we can also share this with your GP.
