Just to let you know that the office opened on Monday 4th January. We will be working through-out the school holidays, with the exception of the Australia Day holiday.

Please feel free to contact Reception on 9274 7062 to make an appointment for your child.

Dear Families,

Our office will be closing on Thursday 24 December at midday and we will be re-opening on Monday 4 January 2021.

From all of us at the Child Welbeing Centre, we wish you a safe and happy holiday!

Last week the Federal government announced plans to extend the number of Medicare supported mental health sessions for all Australians. This was part of a response to the pandemic. It was a recognition that whether we are in lock-down or not,  the challenges of this year are impacting many people’s sense of wellbeing.

What do the changes mean?

For those of our clients who are accessing a GP Mental Health Care Plan, this now means that you can access up to 20 sessions a calendar year should you need them. Until now, we’ve always had a cap of 10 in a calendar year. 

What do I need to do?

Current client? You don’t need to anything if you are currently seeing one of the psychologists in the Centre. When you get near the end of the first 10 sessions, your psychologist will talk to you about your child’s progress and your options. You may need to go back to your GP for a re-referral to access the additional 10 Medicare rebates. Your psychologist will write a report with recommendations for your GP to support this.

Previous Client (wanting to return)? Please feel free to recontact the Centre if you were a previous client and had to stop because you used all 10 sessions this year.  You will need to see your GP to obtain a re-referral prior to seeing your child’s psychologist again. Your GP should already have a report from your psychologist from your last contact.

New client to the Centre? Then it’s business as usual if you want to use mental health care rebates. GPs usually prefer you to book in for a long appointment with them to allow time to discuss your child’s wellbeing. From this, they can make an assessment and referral for you as needed. With new referrals (and curent ones), your GP will want you to see them after the sixth and 10th session (if you need more sessions) for a review.

The announcement of the additional Medicare Mental Health rebates was really welcomed news from the government last week.  I note that the decision is going to be reviewed in June 2022. However, in the meantime this lets us all get on with the task of caring and supporting our children. 

Naomi Ward

Clinical Director

Applied Behaviour Analysis (or ABA) is an intensive intervention used with children with developmental disabilities. It’s not as well known as other forms of intervention (e.g. speech pathology and occupational therapy)  but is no less effective.

What is ABA?

ABA is built on the principles of learning and understanding the function of behaviour. As an example, young children may temper tantrum for a range of reasons. This may be because they can’t tell you what they want, they are tired, they won’t accept your “no” or they really, really want the toy/object/treat.

Once we understand why behaviour is occurring,  we can change it. Sometimes this will be through building new skills or teaching alternatives ways to get needs met.  Sometimes this might be through teaching tolerance to that word “no” (one possible outcome of the example above). 

ABA is Person-Centred

A large component of an ABA approach is taking data. It’s because of this that people sometimes feel that ABA might be impersonal, or out of touch with our loved ones.

At the Child Wellbeing Centre, we see ABA as an individualised child-centred intervention. Goals are negotiated with parents (children too where possible) based on the principles of improving quality of life and day to day function. We want our clients to develop skills in communication, learning, socialising and behaviour. Working with a range of clients, there is nothing more watching children develop and learn. 

An ABA program should include people who are significant to the client e.g. parents and carers. ABA programs for older children will often involve teachers and have input from other therapists too.

Please feel free to contact the Centre for more information about our ABA therapy services (ABACAS) on 9274 7062. We’re very happy to have a chat about how ABA services might work for your child.

There are a number of reasons a child may come to see a paediatric (child) occupational therapist.  The best-known reason is to help with printing and hand-writing. Occupational therapists can do so much more though!

What is Occupational Therapy?

Occupational therapy is about increasing various aspects of a child’s independence and competency. This can include things like working on fine motor skills (think cutting, drawing etc). It can also include aspects of self-care, organisation, mobility and self-regulation (think managing sensory needs and calming down). For children, it’s about having the skills to do well at home and school.

Sometimes therapy will include working directly with the child to increase their skills. It can also look more like parent or teacher consultancy. At the end of the day, the occupational therapist will work with the child, parent and school to improve core skills – whoever can help!

How can Occupational Therapy help my child?

Occupational therapists usually start with an assessment to be clear about the child’s needs. This can come in many forms. In the first instance, the assessment may focus on development such as aspects of fine motor and handwriting,  gross motor and visual perception skills. The occupational therapist will be able to give you feedback on how your child is developing compared to peers and recommendations on how to address any concerns.

Functional assessments (such as those asked for by the NDIS) are where the occupational therapist looks at all aspects of a child’s independence. The goal here is to identify strengths and weaknesses and to make recommendations about the next steps. This kind of assessment can be helpful for prioritising goals and identifying needs. Typically this will be a much more comprehensive assessment.

Following on from assessments comes individual therapy. This is tailored to match the therapy goals you as a parent and the occupational therapist decide upon. Therapy is usually one on one and designed to be engaging for the child. There will usually be some homework tasks too as we aim to keep the good work up outside of sessions.

Occupational therapy at the CWBC

At the Child Wellbeing Centre our Occupational Therapists work with young children, primary and secondary students.

We’ve recently been joined by Jeannie Loi, Occupational Therapist who will be working from our Brockman Road office on Thursdays and Fridays. Jeannie has a background in working with children with disabilities on a range of issues (and she is very nice too!).

Please feel free to contact our Reception for more information about our services on 9274 7062.

Naomi Ward

Clinical Director

Managing strong feelings at the best of times can be challenging. Our children take their lead from us. When we are chaotic, so are they. When we are in the grip of strong feelings such as anger and sadness, they watch and learn (whether this is positive or negative) how to react and behave. When we are calm and rational, they are more likely to model this too, and if not, at least we are in a better place to help them with their strong feelings.

We want to be able to coach them through these strong feelings and teach them how to manage them well. However, that means we ourselves need to have a sense of how to do this so that we can help our children find calm. Sometimes, even if we do know what to say and do, our own strong reactions to them can interfere with a rational and helpful response.

What to do with strong feelings first?

Here are some tips to initial responses you can try:

• • Allow them to express themselves (without hurting anyone), for a minute or two. This might be verbal or non-verbal expression;
  • Reflect back to them what you think they might be feeling …“you seem pretty angry”, “do you feel frustrated?”, “are you sad?”.  Often merely acknowledging their feelings will help diminish their intensity. When children feel seen and heard, they tend to calm naturally;
  • However, when their feelings are very big and strong, we may need to let them express it further, but help them to do this more appropriately. For example “do you need to stomp out your anger?” (and stomp with them), “why don’t you hit this cushion with all of your anger?” (and stay close by), “it’s ok to scream loudly, but do it into the air or a pillow…not my face”.

How to help children calm down

Any break in this expression of feeling is the time to jump in with calming strategies:

• • encourage little ones to breathe, and in particular to blow out a big breath, just like blowing out lots of candles;
  • explain to pre-teens and teens that we need to expel the build-up of carbon dioxide that makes us feel sick and dizzy;
  • encourage them to move around, to shift the adrenalin that has built up;
  • connect with little ones again, by holding their hands and looking into their eyes, affirming to them that they are safe and not in trouble for having big strong feelings. If there was a trigger event of a conflict, address this afterwards, but not right now. Wait about 10 minutes before talking about it when you are both calm;
  • connect with teens by a touch, a text, or gesture of making them something to eat or drink. Give them the option of talking to you, if not straight away, then perhaps in the car on your next trip. If conflict needs to be addressed, deliver the pre-agreed upon consequence without negotiation or emotion.

What if strong feelings are becoming a problem?

If you are unsure, our experienced psychologists can be your coach. They will then be able to show you how to model becoming calm for your children to see and encourage how to teach your children with similar strategies.

We all know that parenting is not an easy journey and that many of us experience stress and anxiety or even guilt at times. If this is the case, and you are overwhelmed with your own strong feelings, we have a clinic at the CWBC designed specifically to address parenting stress and anxiety.

During these challenging times, the Centre remains open and can offer in-person sessions or online meetings.

Please contact Reception for further information.

Sharon Jones

Principal Psychologist

As you will be aware, we are living in very complex and challenging times. I want to affirm for you that the Child Wellbeing Centre will continue to provide therapy services in the weeks and months to come. Our aim is to provide a range of options to meet the needs of our children and families, including face to face consultation, telephone or video-conferencing and in some instance “therapy packages” for parents to work on with children at home.

As an allied health practice, we are considered an essential service. Further, we are being asked by both the NDIS and the Australian Government Department of Health to find ways to continue providing services during these difficult times. No one knows when the “other side of the pandemic” will arrive so we are now thinking about the short and long term strategies.

The NDIS introduced a number of measures at the start of the week to support service providers such as the Child Wellbeing Centre. This was done in recognition of the challenges ahead – both to keep therapy going and to keep staff employed.

A summary of changes is below. We ask for your support and co-operation as we introduce these new measures.

Normally when we make changes at the Centre I try to give a lot more notice. However we live in challenging times and my management team and I are making decisions day to day in the interest of our clients and staff. I sincerely hope these are temporary measures only and that we find our way back to “normality” soon.

Our preference is to keep providing therapy and problem solve how we can best do this with you. We have lots of creative ideas about how we can do this. COVID-19 doesn’t have to stop therapy.

Please feel free to talk to your case manager and consultant about these changes. Let us know if you are thinking of withdrawing from therapy and feel free to ask about the alternatives. Brookke Haggett, Business Operations Manager is also available to during the week should you need to have a chat.

Kind regards,

Naomi Ward

Clinical Director

I’m sure you’re all too aware that if there is one constant at the moment with Covid-19, it’s that things keep changing! Like you, we are monitoring the news on a daily basis and making decisions about how we can keep our staff, clients and community safe.

As allied health professionals, we will keep providing our usual therapy services to our clients for as long as it is safe for us to do. We are still offering face to face therapy but you’ll note we are vigilant about handwashing and hand sanitisers…whether we see you in the Centre or in schools or at home. We are also keeping staff home when they have flu/cold symptoms and asking our clients to stay home too if they are unwell.

We’re getting a little creative too!

Telehealth services are available. This means therapy via telephone and video conferencing.  A few of our staff are currently learning about videoconferencing and how to use this for therapy. Others have already been providing services this way to our country clients for some time. The nice thing is that most of our children will be fine in this medium (and probably be the experts!). It will probably be the adults catching up!

Where we can we are also looking at what we can do to set up independent therapy tasks for those self-isolated at home, particularly with our ABA clients.

Please feel free to talk to your consultant about how we can support you and your children. We will be working hard to be flexible.

We’re not planning on going anywhere just yet!

Naomi Ward

Clinical Director

We are certainly living in very interesting times. Our news and social media is flooded with news about the Covid-19 virus and the impact it is having in people’s lives.

At the Centre we are trying to operate on a business as usual basis and will continue to provide therapy services for our clients. However we are changing a few things to minimise the risk of infection for everyone.

What are we doing?

In our consulting rooms, you’ll be seeing staff using hand sanitisers more often – in particular at the start and end of sessions. If our staff are seeing you at home, they will be practising hand-washing with your children.

We’ve beefed up our toy cleaning regime to try and keep resources as germ-free as possible.

Our front desk staff will be regularly wiping the EFTPOS machine and reception counter and ledges with disinfectants too.

We are reviewing procedures on a day to day basis in light of what we are learning from the Coronavirus updates. A really useful website (in case you haven’t come across it so far) is the Department of Health WA website:

https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/coronavirus

How can you help?

Please encourage your child to wash their hands when they come into the Centre. Hand washing, when done properly, is still the most effective way of reducing the spread of germs.

Please keep children, yourself and other family members home if they have cold/flu symptoms. This becomes even more critical as we get closer to winter. Those wonderful people working at the Coronavirus screening clinics just won’t have the capacity to screen everyone and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Let Reception know as soon as you can that you need to reschedule.

Please don’t be angry with staff if you come to an appointment and you or your child is unwell and we ask you to leave. We understand that therapy is important but the priority at the moment is to minimise the spread of infection in the community.

Oh, and this one is a bit cheeky….please don’t “borrow” our toilet paper rolls.   Quite a few rolls disappeared last week. We’re running short like everyone else on hand sanitisers, tissues and toilet rolls and are working very hard to source replacements. Toilet paper is proving the trickiest to find!

Working together we can have a big impact in slowing down the virus and protecting the most vulnerable in the community. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation in advance.

Naomi Ward

Clinical Director