What To Expect
Initial Contact
When we meet for the first time, be this online or in person, we will both work together to conduct an analysis of the needs of your child.
Much time will be spent in deep discussion, where you will provide me with a comprehensive and in-depth view of your child's developmental, medical and family history, previous successful and unsuccessful therapies, and bring me all the way up to date to the present day. I will ask many questions based on the information that you provide me with in your child’s referral form. The goal here is to gain as much knowledge as I possibly can on your child's current profile and discover where difficulties are arising and where any deficits are.
Some assessments may or may not take place during this stage.
I might recommend that other professionals be sought such as a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist or a general practitioner.
Assessment
Once we have done an initial brief on your child and their needs, I will know better what areas require assessing, and so a skills assessment can begin to take place. This may be assessing behaviours that are interfering with day-to-day living for your child and your family. It could be assessing early intervention skill sets and deficits, or perhaps a play and social skills assessment. These assessments can be a mix of observations of your child in-person or remotely, which will complement parental interviews, questionnaires, and data generated over the space of a week or so.
This is where I will also review any other documentation that you might have which may be relevant to our work together.
If required, I may interview other professionals who are currently working with your child, such as their school teacher, speech and language therapist, or home tutor.
Goal Setting
This is the stage where we will discuss the results of the assessments that were carried out. Based on the assessment results and on our initial discussion, we will set therapeutic goals and objectives for the future and establish a projected timeframe for our plans to come to fruition.
An individual treatment plan will be developed by myself based on the above. The duration and scope of this plan can vary from a few weeks to months and even years, so it is important for us to establish what our goals are and what our expected time frame or aim will be. The goal of my therapy is that you and your child will not need my services!
We will also discuss the specifics of therapy going forward such as the frequency of our sessions, data collection, supervision of homework and monitoring progress, and setting therapist and parental duties and expectations, to name but a few.
Therapy Commencement
Once we have our plans made and everything is in place, we can now begin therapy together.
All our goals will be written into individualised programmes for your child.
Teaching will typically consist of natural environmental teaching (embedding teaching into natural contextual circumstances) and can also include some tabletop activities. This will vary on the environmental and situational variables, and on your child's age and learning repertoire.
Parental participation is key to learning and so, parent training is typically seen once therapy begins with your child.
Treatment goals and plans can change, be updated, removed and replaced with more relevant ones as time goes on. Alternatively, if a treatment plan is not meeting its goal, then this requires changing.
