South County Child and Family Consultants

Objective 2: Learn what goes into a psychological evaluation.

Evidence: List and detail the process that goes into a psychological evaluation of a client from the initial phone call to set up an appointment.

Activities: Answering the phones, taking down client information, making insurance calls, setting up appointments and necessary paperwork, questionnaires for parents and teachers sent out, grading and scoring the questionnaires as well as client testing, creating summary of results to add into evaluation report, adding recommendations in to report.

I am typically in charge of taking down new client information and making sure their insurances are accepted by my supervisor as well as making sure they are calling for the right thing. My supervisor only does psychological evaluations of children up to age 21 or in college. He no longer does counseling, so that is one thing I need to let people know. I also make sure that they know this is a series of appointments, about 3-4 depending on the amount of testing that must be administered and if they get done what they need to in each session. The review is the final appointment that sums up all the test and observations my supervisor has made, where the diagnoses is explained and what the next step is as far as where to go from here.

When someone calls in looking for a evaluation of their child, we ask for a brief description of why they are coming. If someone does ask to come meet with my supervisor, they would give us some information, briefly explain the evaluation process, and set them up with an appointment. The following is a step-by-step process of how an evaluation works;

1. Client calls in and asks for my supervisor; we ask what insurance they have and ask to take down some basic information that they would give if they came in to set up the appointment.

2. Fill out "green sheet" (a intake form) completely with brief description for reasons of service and insurance information.

3. Explain the following: My supervisor see's new DI (Diagnostic Intake) clients on Monday, Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is a one hour appointment for both parent and child so that the doctor may make observations and speak with the parent and child about what is going on. He then decides what testing needs to be done, and you set up a series of 3 appointments after the initial DI session; two testing appointments, can be up to 3 hours each, and a final review of the results where you go over the evaluation report and the results and talk about the next step.