DR. HEIDI KIEFER
Clinical Psychologist
Pronouns: she | her | hers
I provide psychological services to children, adolescents and families and am registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
Knowing how brave individuals are in seeking support, I strive to use empathic and creative practices to build rapport, understand experiences and help them feel that they are not alone.
I prioritize forming a safe and trusting therapeutic relationship in order to tailor services to best embrace a client’s personal style, strengths, needs and goals. Using an integrative approach, I employ evidence-based techniques related to relational/psychodynamic, play, emotion-focused, narrative, dialectical-behavioural, cognitive-behavioural and mindfulness-based therapies. In collaboration with clients, I am flexible in deciding how services are best delivered or combined (e.g., individual therapy, parent counselling, school consultation, family meetings) so that meaningful change is possible.
In addition to my work at Prime Connections, I am a psychologist at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital where I focus on developmental assessments querying Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with children under 5 years of age. As part of the Holland Bloorview community, I benefit from the setting’s cutting edge ASD research, emphasis on child and family-centred care, multidisciplinary teamwork (developmental pediatricians, social workers and occupational therapists) and high bioethical standards for pediatric health care. I also offer clinical supervision to graduate level psychology students. My clinical and research training has been gained through educational placements and work positions at the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre (now SickKids Centre for Community Mental Health), Reach Out Centre for Kids (ROCK), Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and the Oshawa Psychological and Counselling Services Clinic (OPCS).
