Occupational Therapy Services in Kedron
At Beam Health Kedron, our dedicated team of Occupational Therapists is committed to delivering high-quality, client-centred services. We recognise the importance of truly listening to children and their families, allowing us to develop tailored therapy plans that focus on helping children achieve meaningful and important goals.
Our Occupational Therapists offer therapy and intervention strategies that can be implemented across various settings, including our clinic, your home, through telehealth, at school, and within the community.
Children engage in many daily occupations and activities, such as self-care, play, school, and social interactions. When challenges arise in these areas, they can affect a child’s self-esteem, ability to socialise, develop relationships, and stay focused. Our Occupational Therapists work closely with you to identify areas of concern, promoting independence, performance, and participation in daily activities.
We provide experiences that foster skill development and support the achievement of meaningful goals. Our Occupational Therapists in North Brisbane are committed to delivering a comprehensive and holistic approach to ensure the best possible outcomes. This typically begins with an initial assessment to understand your child’s strengths, interests, learning styles, and the nature of their challenges, whether they are motor, sensory, learning, social, or emotional and behavioural.
Using this information, we collaborate with you to create individualised therapy plans and family-centred goals. Our services are delivered in a fun, nurturing, and safe environment, where we encourage open communication about strategies to support your child’s development, both during and outside therapy sessions. We also value collaboration with your child’s other health and education professionals to ensure a cohesive approach to achieving their goals.
Our ultimate aim is to enhance your child’s ability to engage in day-to-day activities, achieve their goals, and improve their overall quality of life.
How Can Our North Brisbane Occupational Therapists Help?
Beam’s Occupational Therapy team in Brisbane is committed to delivering high-quality, client-centered care tailored to each child’s unique needs. Our experienced therapists use evidence-based practices to help children enhance their ability to play, learn, and develop essential skills. Through thorough assessments and targeted interventions, we work on areas of concern while also leveraging your child’s strengths to promote their overall development.
We are registered with both the NDIS and Medicare, allowing us to offer flexible support across various settings—whether in our clinic, at home, in school, within the community, or online via telehealth. Eligible participants may access therapy services through NDIS and Medicare funding.
We can help in the following areas:
Self-care activities encompass essential daily routines such as dressing, bathing, toileting, personal hygiene (like brushing teeth and washing hair), feeding, and sleeping. As children grow, their ability to perform these tasks independently varies, depending on several developmental factors. Challenges in self-care may arise from difficulties in following routines, maintaining focus and attention, poor sleep patterns, executive functioning issues, motor skill difficulties (both fine and gross), and sensory processing differences.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist will evaluate your child’s current ability to perform self-care tasks and identify any barriers to independence. Through targeted interventions and age-appropriate strategies, your therapist will work to enhance your child’s skills, promoting greater independence in their daily self-care activities.
Handwriting skills are built upon a range of developmental areas, including motor, sensory, visual-perceptual, and cognitive abilities. These foundational skills begin to develop in early childhood as children learn and integrate various abilities. Key components for effective handwriting include bilateral arm coordination, the ability to cross the midline, postural control and upper limb stability, the development of pencil grip and pre-writing skills through activities like drawing and colouring, as well as the strengthening of hand muscles and the refinement of precise finger movements.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist can perform a comprehensive handwriting assessment to pinpoint any challenges that may be affecting your child’s writing abilities. Through tailored intervention, your therapist will work with your child to enhance their handwriting skills, offering strategies and activities for both home and school environments. Areas of focus often include improving pencil grasp and pressure, enhancing legibility and letter formation, increasing writing speed, adjusting spacing, and fostering ideation.
Fine motor skills involve the precision, dexterity, and coordination of the fingers and hands. These skills are essential for everyday tasks such as feeding oneself, managing fasteners like buttons and zips, pinching, grasping, and manipulating small objects like pencils and toys.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist in Brisbane can support your child in developing fine motor skills through personalised therapeutic activities tailored to their specific needs. These interventions are designed to enhance fine motor skills, leading to improved functional abilities in daily tasks. Areas of focus may include tying shoelaces, managing fasteners, opening containers, using cutlery, pencil grasp, cutting skills, and activities involving building and construction.
Gross motor skills refer to the larger movements we make with our major muscle groups, including the legs, arms, and core muscles. These skills are crucial for activities such as walking, running, jumping, standing, and sitting. Gross motor skills enable children to engage in sports, physical play, and everyday tasks like getting dressed, safely transferring in and out of the bath or shower, and maintaining postural control.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist can support your child in developing gross motor skills, enhancing their ability to participate in meaningful activities. A comprehensive motor assessment allows the therapist to observe your child’s strengths and challenges, leading to the creation of a personalised therapy plan tailored to their specific needs.
Mealtimes are often an important social occasion where families or peers come together. However, when a child faces challenges around feeding and eating, mealtimes can become stressful. Common difficulties children might experience include trouble using cutlery, an inability to remain seated at the table, or aversions to certain foods, ranging from mild dislikes to strong refusals.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist can work with you and your family to create positive mealtime experiences. Depending on the specific challenges, the therapist can:
- Assist your child in developing the skills needed to effectively use cutlery.
- Provide support with meal planning and preparation.
- Explore strategies to help your child stay seated during meals, encouraging them to eat with the family within a reasonable timeframe.
- Offer techniques to manage picky eating, reducing the stress associated with mealtimes. Through playful feeding activities, your therapist can gently and respectfully help expand your child’s food preferences and create a positive relationship with food, using approaches like food chaining.
Play is a child’s primary occupation and a crucial aspect of their development, offering opportunities to acquire and refine skills in a fun, creative, and imaginative way. Through play, children engage all their senses, explore and interact with their environment, and develop a range of essential skills. Play enables children to express emotions, develop self-regulation, build social skills and relationships, communicate, and practice motor skills. As children grow, they progress through different stages of play, including solitary, parallel, associative, and cooperative play. Types of play may vary and can include role play, pretend/fantasy play, constructive/creative play, sensory play, exploratory play, and physical play. Each child’s play style is unique, reflecting their interests and strengths.
How can Occupational Therapy help?
An Occupational Therapist can support your child in developing their individual play style, whether they are playing alone or with peers. The therapist can also collaborate with you, your child’s educators, and teachers to enhance play skills and foster social opportunities through inclusive play strategies.
Emotional and behavioural regulation involves the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotional responses effectively. Children may experience heightened emotions due to various factors and events in their daily lives. When a child struggles with emotional regulation, it can lead to behaviours such as outbursts, meltdowns, and tantrums. These challenges can affect a child’s participation in daily activities, strain relationships, and hinder their learning and development.
How can an Occupational Therapist help?
Your Brisbane Occupational Therapist will work closely with you and your child to understand the underlying factors affecting their emotional regulation. By exploring and implementing tailored strategies, your therapist will help your child manage their emotions more effectively. Additionally, your therapist will collaborate with you to deepen your understanding of your child’s regulation system, empowering you to support them in everyday situations.
Executive function skills are complex cognitive abilities that enable us to plan, carry out tasks, pay attention, remember instructions, and solve problems. When a child struggles with executive functioning, they may face challenges in several areas, such as:
- Planning and organising
- Following step-by-step instructions
- Coping with difficult situations
- Setting goals and identifying the steps needed to achieve them
- Working in busy or distracting environments
- Thinking before acting
- Adapting to changes in routine
- Initiating tasks and maintaining focus
- Managing time effectively
- Problem-solving
Children with difficulties in executive functioning may appear disorganised or inattentive and can experience cognitive overload more quickly than their peers, potentially leading to meltdowns.
How can an Occupational Therapist help?
Executive functioning skills develop through natural maturation, but some children may need additional time and support to strengthen these abilities. Your Occupational Therapist will assist your child by providing tailored guidance and strategies to enhance their executive functioning at home and in the classroom. They will also create opportunities for skill-building through targeted therapeutic activities, helping your child develop the tools they need to succeed in daily life.
Sensory processing refers to how a child’s brain perceives, interprets, and organizes information received through the senses. Efficient sensory processing enables a child to make sense of the world and respond appropriately to various stimuli in their environment. For example, a child with well-regulated sensory processing can pay attention in a bustling classroom and complete tasks effectively. However, sensory processing differences can impact a child’s ability to participate in everyday activities and maintain focus.
Children with sensory processing challenges may exhibit hypersensitivity (heightened sensitivity) or hyposensitivity (reduced sensitivity) to sensory input:
- Hypersensitivity: These children may become easily overwhelmed by sensory stimuli. For instance:
- Covering their ears or becoming startled by loud or unexpected sounds.
- Refusing to wear certain clothing due to discomfort, describing it as “scratchy” or painful.
- Eating only a limited variety of foods, often referred to as being a “picky eater.”
- Preferring dim lighting or complaining of headaches from bright lights.
- Hyposensitivity: In contrast, these children may require more intense sensory input to register sensations. Examples include:
- Not noticing when their hands or face are dirty.
- Failing to respond when their name is called.
- Exhibiting poor body awareness.
- Seeking out high levels of movement or intense physical activity.
How can an Occupational Therapist help?
Our Occupational Therapists can assess your child’s sensory processing abilities to understand how they perceive and respond to sensory information. Based on this assessment, we can provide personalized recommendations and interventions to help your child manage sensory input more effectively. This support can enhance their ability to perform daily tasks, increase their engagement in the classroom, and improve their overall participation in various activities.
Visual perception refers to the brain’s ability to interpret and make sense of visual information from our surroundings. This includes recognizing and distinguishing colors, shapes, and sizes. Strong visual perceptual skills are crucial for a variety of daily and academic activities, such as dressing, reading, writing, copying information, cutting, matching objects, completing puzzles, and finding specific items in a group (e.g., locating a red dinosaur among other toys).
How Can Occupational Therapy Help?
At our Kedron clinic, our Occupational Therapists assess your child’s visual perception abilities and design personalized therapy programs. These programs feature engaging and creative activities aimed at improving visual perceptual skills, making everyday tasks easier and more enjoyable for your child.
Sleep is essential for overall health and well-being. Insufficient sleep can impact cognitive functions, such as reduced processing speed and brain fog, decrease stress management abilities, and affect motor skills, leading to clumsiness. Several factors can hinder a child’s sleep, including:
- Sensory processing difficulties
- Reliance on a parent to fall asleep
- Routines that don’t align with the child’s needs
- Challenges with self-regulation or self-soothing
- Anxiety (in some cases, a psychologist might be more appropriate; we can help guide you to the right service).
How Can an Occupational Therapist Help?
Our Occupational Therapists can pinpoint barriers to your child’s sleep and develop strategies to address them. We focus on improving sleep hygiene, creating a conducive sleep environment, applying sensory strategies, and addressing relational needs.
Please note that while Occupational Therapists can support sleep-related issues, they do not treat sleep disorders directly. For concerns about potential sleep disorders, a consultation with your GP or a sleep specialist is recommended.
Learning difficulties and specific learning disabilities can impact a child’s self-confidence, academic performance, and engagement in the classroom.
Specific Learning Disabilities encompass challenges such as:
- Dyslexia: Issues with decoding, spelling, and word recognition.
- Dysgraphia: Struggles with handwriting, spelling, and written expression.
- Dyscalculia: Difficulties with understanding numbers and mathematical concepts.
Children with these disabilities may avoid schoolwork, particularly reading, writing, and math tasks. This can lead to low self-esteem, mental fatigue, and difficulties coping with daily demands.
Learning Difficulties differ from specific learning disabilities. They may be influenced by underlying factors such as sensory processing challenges, handwriting issues, emotional or behavioral regulation difficulties, and poor visual perception. Children with learning difficulties often have significant potential to meet age-appropriate expectations with the right support.
How Can an Occupational Therapist Help?
Our Occupational Therapists can assess the root causes of learning difficulties and support your child in understanding and overcoming their challenges. We offer strategies to reinforce skills and manage mental fatigue, and can recommend assistive technology or methods to support learning. For children with motor-based dysgraphia, we can also provide targeted interventions to improve handwriting.
Other Professionals Involved:
- Psychologists: For diagnosing specific learning disabilities, particularly those with expertise in educational psychology.
- Speech Pathologists: To support literacy skills and address related communication challenges.
