Assessment Resources
Waitlists and Guidelines
The BC Autism Assessment Network provides quality assessments free of charge with a physician's referral at the Sunny Hill Centre for Children. Current wait times for BCAAN are available here.
The BC Provincial government has set guidelines for autism assessment for children and youth in BC.
The following Article provides a guide for autism assessments in BC:
https://www.autismbc.ca/blog/autism-assessment-bc/
Funding
For funding eligibility, assessments of children and youth in BC must include specific criteria:
Children under the age of 6-years – For children under the age of 6-years at the time of the assessment, 3 assessments are required.
Pediatrician – Developmental assessment – A pediatrician will examine your child to determine where they are at in terms of developmental milestones. The pediatrician will also look for signs and symptoms of autism. After the assessment is complete, you will need to request a copy of the report from the pediatrician office
Speech and Language assessment – An SLP assessment is required to examine your child’s social communication as well as expressive and receptive language skills. This assessment may have an additional cost if completed privately. Here is a link of private SLP practitioners who are able to complete speech assessments as part of the Autism assessment process (https://speechandhearingbc.ca/#professional-map). After the assessment is complete, you will need to request a copy of the report.
Psychology – This is the portion of the assessment that we complete. For this part of the assessment, we look at the whole child. The parent portion of the assessment includes a 2-3 hour interview (ADI-R) that focuses on your child’s early developmental years. The child portion of the assessment includes a cognitive assessment if one has not been completed and an autism observation interview (ADOS-2). In addition to the face-to-face portion mentioned above, we also collect a thorough background intake and have checklists completed by parents and teachers. We incorporate the pediatrician assessment and SLP assessment as part of our assessment.
For Children over 6-years: The parent portion of the assessment includes a 2-3 hour interview (ADI-R) that focuses on your child’s early developmental years. The child portion of the assessment includes a cognitive assessment if one has not been completed and an autism observation interview (ADOS-2). In addition to the face-to-face portion mentioned above, we also collect a thorough background intake and have checklists completed by parents, teachers and youth themselves.