Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi everyone, I'm Christine, my son has been offered an assessment for Autism (he is 19) but due to the pandemic, it would be carried out online. I am wondering whether any of you have been assessed this way and what it entails. I would have thought being assessed via zoom would not give very accurate results and are there any practical tests that are carried out if you are not physically in the same room as the assessors. Thanks for any help.
Is he getting assessed as an adult or being squeezed in as a child? Also, which area are you in?
Im on the spectrum and also do assessments within CAMHS so might be able to help a little. We have found virtual assesments really helpful for a lot of our teenagers who aren't sharers. In our assessments we ask them to show us their bedrooms if they are comfortable with that and we can gain a lot about obsessions and find out their interests to try and initiate some conversation around them. We have found the trickiest for video calls are the young children but if it's quite a struggle we invite them for an in-person assessment. Remember it's what the clinicians do everyday and they will notice more than you think. Motor mannerisms can be difficult over video so we tend to go off parental/school responses and obviously ask the young person if they are old enough and seem to have a little insight into what they do. Eye contact is also tricky but we can still pick up more than you realise. Lots of trial appointments with other clinicians and family members were done when assessments first transitioned to virtual due to covid to get a sense of what things looked like on camera and figure out if we were getting what was needed.