Sickkids Foundation

Sickkids Psychology is an active, vibrant, and intellectually stimulating environment that provides evidence-based clinical care and rich training opportunities at all levels. We provide consultation, assessment, diagnosis, treatment recommendations and interventions for children and adolescents up to the age of 18 who are being treated at SickKids for primary medical and psychiatric conditions.

Our department is a warm, respectful, collegial and collaborative setting that places the child and family at the centre of all that we do and is informed by our developmental expertise. Our clinical, health and neuropsychologists, psychometrists and trainees use evidence-based approaches to provide services and integrate clinical care, research and training into all of our activities. We consider and respect the diversity of the families we serve with respect to language, culture, level of function, gender identity, medical and trauma history.

The depth and breadth of our collective clinical expertise allows us to provide a variety of psychological services to address complex patient needs. Referrals are welcome from our physician and professional colleagues from the many medical programs in the hospital. Examples of specialized psychological services include:

Providing evidence-based CBT for anxiety disorders;

Assessing and diagnosing neuropsychological disorders in children with a variety of developmental or acquired CNS conditions;

Contributing to surgical decisions for our epilepsy surgery population;

Psychological consultation to rural communities through our Telelink Mental Health program; and

Providing group interventions for:

young children with eating disorders,

adolescents with complex obesity, and

children and adolescents with chronic pain.

In addition to providing consultation, assessment, diagnosis and treatment, psychology staff are involved in clinical research. In collaboration with our medical and professional colleagues, we study the efficacy of our services, quality of life, mental health and neuropsychological outcomes of developmental or acquired brain conditions or after medical interventions, and risk/resilience factors in brain development, among many other topics.

Our training programs are central to our department and include trainees at the practicum, internship and fellowship levels. We value the insights and dedication of our trainees and value supervision, as reflected by our biannual mentorship award.