Clinical Services
Dr Fiona Zandt and Associates is a private fee paying clinic for children between 2 and 12 years of age. We provide therapy as well as assessments.
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Therapy and Intervention
If your child has been referred for support or intervention our first step will be getting to know them as well as your family. This is generally our focus in the first couple of sessions and we will then talk with you, working together to understand what is happening for your child. Together with you and your child we will develop some therapy goals and create a plan for our sessions.
Our approach to therapy involves engaging your child in therapy using play, games, art and stories. We will work closely with you throughout this process, helping you to building connection and communication with your child and helping you to support your child outside of sessions. This might mean that you remain in the session with your child throughout the session or have some time with us at the beginning or end of each session. We may also have some whole family sessions or parent only sessions, depending on your family's needs.
We utilise established therapies that are considered best practice, including play therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, ACT, narrative therapy, and emotion coaching. The approach we take will depend on your child's needs and we will talk with you about this as we begin therapy.
We believe that children do best when all of the professionals who are supporting them work together. For this reason we will chat with you about how we might be best able to communicate with other members of your child's team. This can include paediatricians, teachers, speech and occupational therapists.
Developmental and Diagnostic Assessments
An assessment can be a helpful way to better understand your child. If you or someone in your child's team has raised concerns about your child's social or emotional development, their thinking skills, learning or attention, an assessment might be suggested.
When you talk with us about an assessment we will talk with you and come up with a plan together. We'll let you know what the assessment will involve and how many appointments it will take, along with the cost for each appointment. Assessments begin with an information gathering session, which involves us meeting with you and hearing about your child. We also collect information from your child's childcare, kindergarten or school at this point and read through any previous assessments. You may like to invite your child to this session as well.
After this we begin assessing your child. We engage your child in the assessment process, ensuring that we have an opportunity to observe both their strengths in addition to learning about anything they find challenging. Our assessments help us to identify autism, attentional difficulties, intellectual disability and learning difficulties.
Following the assessment we will meet with you, and your child if appropriate, to help you understand the results and think about any support your child might need going forward. We provide comprehensive reports following assessments that enable you, along with your child’s teacher and others to better understand and support your child.