Is there a "developmental pediatrician" specialty in the UK? In the US, this is the ped specialty to whom you'd take your suspected SN child for evaluation.

[Mamax4]

Usually, if you take your child to a regular pediatrician, they tell you "not to worry", the child will "grow out of it", he is "a little slow but will catch up". I am actually in Italy and when I took my ASD ds to a reg ped here for obvious speech delay, I was told that "he was not mute, right?" and denied services. Took me 4 more years to squeeze a dx out of them. In the US, this would be unthinkable. Am trying to figure out how things are in the UK, where we may move for work. So- where do I take my 2.5yo for a comprehensive evaluation bc I know he is speech delayed (btdt). We have insurance so am willing to pay, just tell me where to go, if anywhere. THANK YOU, ladies!

Hi mamax4, if you don't get any joy with GOSH try this,

www.theportlandhospital.com/default.asp

The portland hospital is a private hospital in the centre of london. If you look on the right hand side of the page there is 'find a consultant'. This linked me into a consultant specialising in austism and two salts.

If this is not exactly what you are after, I'm sure they could help you with who else to try and of course, being private, will be familiar with offering services to people from abroad.

Lots of private medical srvices are based around Harley Street in London and my experience is that many of the professions have contacts who work privately.

One of the slt's mentioned on Portland site, Ruth Jacobs, has a large private slt practice in london.

www.ruthjacobs.org.uk/aboutus.html

I don't know her personally but have had contact with some of her therapists in the past.

Good luck. Hope some of this helps.

It's hard to get into an iCAN nursery - usually you need to go via a CDC etc.

agree with yurt re:Ican nurseries. When I asked about DS going to an Ican nursery, I was told that he would have to be assessed by an educational psychologist and that there would be a several month wait for that.

it's easy and quick to arrange private speech therapy - is likely to cost around £75/hour.

Would agree with the general drift...

• there are few private paeds. In the UK, it tends to be the specialism they go into for love, not money, so only a handful of good ones do private practice. For general medical diagnosis (ie this is what is fundamentally causing your child's difficulties) you are probably better off in the queue. Furthermore there can be difficulties moving from private to NHS eg a private scan may not tell the NHS guru what he needs because the resolution is wrong.
• once you have a diagnosis, therapy can be accessed faster and often better privately.
• many treatments don't need a paed's diagnosis. You can start private SALT or physio while in the queue, though you risk change of approach when the diagnosis arrives
• there is a bit of a mess at the overlap between NHS and school: unlike the US, SN schools are entirely run by and for education. NHS services speak to the school and visit to provide therapy or input to education plans. But still integration is poor. DD1 had a fabulous developmental assessment by the developmental psych team at GOSH. School have not bothered to even read it, as it was not provided by the NHS people they have contact with. The school physio isn't much cop. I've talked to a far better one at the hospice and she has given us good advice which I mentioned at review to school. But they refuse to implement this advice because it wasn't officially given by the school physio... Sorry, waffly, but my point is you can buy in private services - but still have a fight to get benefit from them.

I can't say how great you all are- THANK YOU. I have a wealth of info to digest now. R3dh3d, your dev psych eval at GOSH was done as a tertiary referral, I presume? Ie, in NHS. And still the school would not respect the recommendations? yikes.

I don't know where in UK you are aiming for but in our case a joint research centre run by a local university child psychiatry dept and a local NHS children's hospital provided a fast track diagnosis.

Dr Sethu Wariyar is a consultant in Paediatric in London, with a special interest in Neurodevelopmental problems particularly ADHD, ASD, Communication disorders, Development Co-ordination Disorders and Tic Disorders for over 10 years.
www.sethuwariyar.co.uk

I would also be mindful of the massively different approaches between the UK and the US. For example, insurers in the US will regularly give kids 30 to 40 hours of ABA a week. In the UK ABA isn’t nearly as popular and I believe that it would be very difficult to get it paid for. The route that seems to be taken in the UK is more putting kids into mainstream settings (nursery/pre-school or school) and then giving them a shadow/TA (which you would have to fight for) to help them keep up/integrate. The main problem with this is that if they haven’t learnt the basics - joint attention, compliance etc. - through ABA or other individually tailored therapies it may be pretty unsuccessful.
This is just my experience of the two systems others may have had different experiences.

(Zombie thread guys)