Comprehensive Neurodevelopment Assessment
An Appointment with Dr Kate Martin
Dr Kate Martin is a fully qualified Consultant Paediatrician with expertise and qualifications in Neurodevelopment disorders and over 25 years' clinical experience in this area.
In her NHS post she is the Clinical Lead for Neurodisabilty and works with families and colleagues to understand complex developmental profiles and how they interact with each other, in order to identify how best to support children and young people.
Dr Kate Martin will assess your child by gathering information from you your child and their school. She will undertake a full medical and neurological examination and talk to your child. This will allow her to establish if your child has a neurodevelopmental disorder, and if so, what it is and what the next steps should be.
Dr Kate Martin will be able to make or exclude medical diagnoses and integrate the reports from all professionals so that you can fully understand the information given to you and have this information in a way that is useful to you.
Sometimes families can see a collection of professionals who all give good advice about the condition that is their area of expertise. As a parent you may not be sure how the recommendations should be integrated and used together.
One of Dr Kate Martin’s areas of expertise is in being able to put together all her findings with those of allied professionals such as Educational Psychologists, Speech & Language Therapists and Occupational Therapists to create one unified profile for your child.
Knowing how the neurodevelopmental conditions overlap and affect each other takes skill and expertise to evaluate. Dr Kate Martin has over 25 years' experience in this area.
No diagnosis? Doctor Kate can still help
One of the strengths of Doctor Kate is that it is a paediatrician led service with allied professionals embedded within the service. The Doctor Kate Neurodevelopmental assessment team work together to share their skills and expertise to maximise the quality of their assessments and the advice you will receive after an appointment.
Whilst most people who come to see us are concerned that their child has a neurodevelopmental condition, we are very happy to see children who have features of a neurodevelopmental disorder (and thus much of the same needs) but are recognised as not reaching the diagnostic threshold.
We can help you and your child to understand where the challenges are and why, and how best to maximise your child's strengths to make day to day living a bit less challenging.
We know that parents are experts in their child, and can often see the differences between their child and their peers. When a child doesn’t reach diagnostic threshold it doesn’t mean that the things you are seeing or struggling are not there – it just means they are not as profound as in some people. Sometimes parents are frustrated that they are not being listened to when they are told their child doesn’t have a diagnosis.
Having a comprehensive assessment and a developmental profile from Doctor Kate can help you identify areas of need which are below the diagnostic threshold. You can then share this information with school and other professionals working with and supporting your child. It also means that the strategies that we use for people who do fulfil the diagnostic criteria are more likely to work for your child who has features of these conditions.