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What happens after a referral is made

Once a referral has been received into the West Essex, ADHD Service, the information received will be reviewed by a Multidisciplinary team to ensure the referral is appropriate to be accepted into the service.

If a referral is rejected
The professional who completed your initial referral will receive notification that your referral has not been accepted with a rationale as to why. This may be due to the information on the referral not being detailed enough or the team feel there is alternative provision that may be more suitable for your child.

If a referral is accepted
We will need to gather information from both you and your child’s teachers/ school. We usually start by sending questionnaires to both you and the school.

  1. We will then usually ask for a face to face appointment with you and your child where we will ask for quite a lot more information including what your child was like at an early age, and finish with what their current difficulties, as well as strengths are. We will also ask about any other problems they have or have had, particular around the time of birth.
  2. We will also examine your child including taking their weight & height measurements, pulse, listen to their heart and take their blood pressure.
  3. We will also need to see that your child has the same type of problems in more than one area (for example at home and at school), and that they have been having problems from a relatively young age.

We will then use all this information to see if your child meets the ‘diagnostic threshold’ for ADHD. That means we will consider all the information we collect from you, your child and your child’s school to decide if the type of difficulties and the frequency of difficulties that your child has is enough to say their problems are caused by ADHD.

We use a criteria to diagnose ADHD. The specific criteria we use are internationally recognised and referred to as ‘DSM-5’ (or occasionally ‘ICD-10’) diagnostic criteria for ADHD.
More information can be found at Symptoms and Diagnosis of ADHD | CDC

What happens if my child receives a diagnosis?

If you child has received their diagnosis from the West Essex ADHD Service, you will be invited to the ADHD Parenting Workshop with our ADHD specialist Nurse.

ADHD Parenting Workshop

Essex Child and Family Wellbeing Service run a three-week workshop for parents of children living in West Essex (Harlow, Epping and Uttlesford) who have received a diagnosis of ADHD, this is currently delivered virtually through Microsoft Teams.

The aim of the workshop is to provide information to parents about some of the core features of ADHD and how best to support them. We will cover the following topics, which will be explained in detail:

  • What is ADHD, and what is it like for the child and family
  • Sleep/need to move
  • School/education
  • Parenting strategies
  • Medication

There will be time to discuss ideas and share strategies with other parents. You will not have to talk about your own child with the group, unless you wish to.