Psychosocial Assessments
Dynamic Ability offers a range of holistic assessments designed to capture detailed information about your physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as your ability to function within the community, your support needs and your individual strengths and goals.
Our assessments may be used as a tool to match you with the right plan of action, provide appropriate resources and inform other relevant stakeholders in your funding or access needs.
Your assessment will also help us determine the priority of your support needs, based on the urgency of safety, accommodation needs, mental health support, and other factors.
We have experience working with the public mental health system, private psychiatrists, Department of Communities (CPFS) and other government agencies and can tailor our reporting to meet your individual needs.
Functional Capacity Assessment
A Psychosocial Functional Capacity Assessment is an assessment that provides a scope of how your psychosocial disability impacts your daily life. It evaluates any difficulties or impairment in areas that may affect your ability to work, return to work, to learn and/or to function daily. The assessment offers a baseline measurement of your current symptoms and functioning and uses evidence-based psychometric tests that are highly valid and reliable.
Strengths and Needs Assessment
This assessment is a multi-purpose tool developed to support decision making, including level of care required and service planning. There is focus on identifying the “gaps” in care provision and utilising identified strengths to work together to overcome and build on the same.
Mental State Examination
A mental state examination (MSE) is a structured way of assessing your current state of mind. As with any clinical examination, it is split into several domains:
Appearance and behaviour
Speech
Mood and affect
Thoughts
Perception
Insight and judgement
Risk
The purpose of the MSE is to provide a clear, objective snapshot of your mental functioning at a given point in time. A comprehensive MSE is essential for a psychiatric assessment, helping inform assessment, diagnosis, and management.
Comprehensive Psychosocial Assessment
A Psychosocial Assessment is a tool we use to learn more about you as a person, beyond your diagnosis. It will explore your personal history, physical health, relationships, coping mechanisms and other lifestyle factors so that together we can identify your needs, make recommendations for support, create therapy goals and plan for recovery.
The Dynamic Ability psychosocial assessment has been specifically developed to be an all-inclusive, person focused assessment, with an extensive 16 domains as well as a subsection on strengths, risks and needs.
Risk Assessments & Safety Planning
Risk assessment and safety planning are important processes for anticipating and preventing risks to your well-being. Components of a risk assessment and safety plan can include identification of risks, determining who those risks affect and how, evaluating and analysing risks and putting plans in to action to eliminate the risk or control the risks that can’t be eliminated to minimise injury and illness potential.
Screening Tools and Recommendations
Depending on your individual needs psychosocial screening tools involve a combination of:
Observation
Interviews (structured and formal, semi-structured; or informal question-and-answer type discussions)
Interviews with your family or other key stakeholders
Checklists
Rating scales
The information gathered about you is collated to formulate personalised and meaningful recommendations relevant to your individual circumstances. These can be communicated to key stakeholders when required.
