Occupational Therapy

Welcome to the Occupational Therapy at the Brighton Health Kid’s Paediatric Clinic.

Our role as an OT is to look at how we can help support you and your child, then maybe some specific challenges that you have around toileting, eating, dressing, or self-care related. Or there might be some more generalized behaviour that has been flagged around emotional sensory and social support/integration.

As we see you and your child, out of their functional context (e.g. kinder or the classroom) we want you to be able to first build a poor and understanding of the challenges that you have and secondly look at the strengths that’s your child has and we will work out how we can provide a number of strategies. We call this our pieces of the puzzle scenario, as what we are looking at is key facets such as body strength, hand strength, the ability for the body to regulate from a sensory processing prospective, how your child’s taking on information, how they’re following instructions, how they’re getting started with tasks, what they do if they need to self regulate and provide themselves with a small break (avoidance behaviour). All of these different facets play a role in your child’s works to feel comfortable within a situation and therefore decrease the need for the adrenal system to click in and potentially put your child into a fight or flight response. We are all processing what’s going on around us from a sensory perspective even as adults. What we can do to help out the children is to gain observations in terms of what they’re naturally doing to work to regulate and keep themselves in their calm place and decrease the need for the heightened behaviour to come out.

What you should expect within the initial consultation is that we will provide some activities; sometimes we have the scope to have 2 therapists (only charged for 1) so that we can have more of a conversation time and an observation time. At other times there will only be 1 therapist available. In this way we are getting an understanding of where your child is currently sitting and making suggestions in terms of the next step. We have the ability to have the frequency of sessions tailored to your requirements. We can provide more of a consultative approach if your wanting to get some information and then go away and then work out what you need to be doing in the home environment, but we can also provide more in the way of weekly or fortnightly sessions to help with the momentum if that’s a thing that you want to suit your accommodation. We do complete specific assessments, particularly around sensory processing/sensory processing measure and for hand writing, the etch or/ for more motor planning we do use motor planning and executive functioning, we do use elements of the brunicks, however our general strategy is to start with a combination if the clinical observation and the understanding of what you’re working to achieve. The initial session has the session component and the report component. The report is impetrative as it’s a means of documenting the information that we’ve shared with you in this initial appointment. It’s also a good way of understanding the strategies that we are suggesting and the process that we would like you to be working on, following that initial consultation. The initial appointment is split into 2 sessions from a cost perspective and will be itemized as the session and the report; however the 2 go hand in hand.