Services

Our team provides:

Occupational Therapy

Our Occupational Therapists are experienced in helping children in a range of areas including:

  • Play and social skills
  • Fine Motor Skills
  • Gross Motor Skills
  • Handwriting
  • Bimanual skills
  • Self Care and independent living Skills
  • Preparing for transitions such as starting daycare or school
  • Sensory Processing and regulation
  • Visual Perception
  • Equipment Prescription
  • Praxis and Motor Planning
  • Primitive reflexes
  • Feeding

Our team of Occupational Therapists have all undergone extensive post graduate training to ensure that we are able to provide evidence based therapy to support your baby or child to reach their goals. Allowing them to build the skills they need to become independent and to engage in play, learning and life skills.

Speech

Our Speech Pathologists are experienced in helping children in a range of areas including:

  • Early communication development
  • Play skills
  • Speech difficulties
  • Language delays/disorders
  • Phonological awareness
  • Difficulties with spelling, writing, reading comprehension
  • Stuttering
  • Social skills
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder
  • Auditory Processing Disorder
  • Non-verbal communication
  • Voice disorders
  • Feeding difficulties/disorders
  • Dysphagia/swallowing difficulties

We ensure that our sessions are evidence based and effective in addition to being an enjoyable, fun experience. We work closely with families to help children reach their full potential as communicators.

Physiotherapy

Our Physiotherapists are experienced in helping children in a range of areas including:

  • Gross motor skills
  • Motor planning and learning
  • motor coordination and balance
  • Muscle strength and stretching
  • Exercise and physical activity including sports
  • Assistive technology and prescription of orthotics
  • Play
  • Gait (walking)
  • Poor endurance and low muscle tone
  • Musculoskeletal alignment and body mechanics
  • Babies with Torticollis (difficulty turning their heads)
  • Babies with Plagiocephaly (flat spots on the head)
  • Exploring Tummy time
  • Toddlers and children who exhibit pigeon toe walking, bow legs or knock knees or flat feet.
  • Rolling, crawling, sitting and walking.

Our Physiotherapists are passionate about working in Paediatrics and have a special interest in how the body works. Our staff complete regular professional development to ensure we are able to provide the best service possible. Our therapists provide a wholistic approach to therapy that assesses general musculoskeletal conditions, as well as neurological and mechanical conditions.

Services Delivery

Intensive Therapy

All Together Therapy is proud to be the first service to bring intensive therapy to the Hastings-Port Macquarie Region. Intensive therapy was previously only available in Metropolitan areas such as Sydney or Brisbane, now families are able to enjoy the benefits of intensive therapy on the beautiful mid north coast.

What is intensive therapy?

Intensive therapy occurs at a higher frequency, for example 5 days a week, over a short period of time, for example 3 weeks. This exposes your child to an incredibly high number of repetitions of a particular exercise, functional task or developmental activity in a concentrated short period of time – thus allowing the exercise, task or skill to be achieved. This type of therapy supports children to reach their potential across a range of areas; whether it be strength, balance, independence, functional mobility, dressing, communicating or feeding you can set goals specific for you.

This model allows us to build an individual’s capacity in a shorter time frame allowing time for families to engage in mainstream activities outside of therapy and to promote ongoing goal attainment.

Therapy duration and timeframes will be determined based upon individualised treatment plans developed with our therapists.

Block Therapy

Block therapy occurs weekly during school term periods and usually runs for 9-10 weeks, Blocks are designed to support goal attainment and then for children to have time away from therapy to further develop their skills in alternate terms. Back to back blocks or regular therapy intervals i.e. fortnightly are no longer offered by ATT as research shows that more intensive therapy intervals supports skill development. There are a number of other local practices that provide regular interval therapy if this is what is best suited for your child.  Block therapy is not offered by all therapists and will be determined based upon individualised treatment plans.

Therapy Bursts

Therapy Bursts are available which may include up to 6 hrs of assessment/therapy.  These bursts of therapy will include an initial assessment, basic report, recommendation/home program and follow up. This service is not ongoing and is designed to support families to gather knowledge and tools to support their child to develop skills at home and in the wider community.

Group Therapy

At All Together Therapy we provide a range of groups including but not limited to:

  • SOS Feeding Groups
  • Social Skills
  • Sense Rugby
  • Transition to school
  • Infant Massage
  • And more....

Our Treatments

At All Together Therapy we strive to provide current evidence based therapeutic interventions. Our staff are continually attending professional development to allow us to provide state of the art supports in our regional area. Below are a range of current therapy treatments/interventions that we provide. These are only a small number and additional certifications are held by our team, so if you have any questions please reach out to us and we will happily discuss.

DIRFloortime®

The Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based (DIR®/Floortime™) Model is a framework that tailors assessment and therapy to the unique challenges and strengths of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and other developmental challenges. The objectives of the DIR®/Floortime™ Model are to build healthy foundations for social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. It is the role of the child’s natural emotions and interests which has been shown to be essential for learning interactions that enable the different parts of the mind and brain to work together and to build successively higher levels of social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Floortime™ is a specific technique to both follow the child’s natural emotional interests (lead) and at the same time challenge the child towards greater and greater mastery of the social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. With young children these playful interactions may occur on the “floor”, but go on to include conversations and interactions in other places. 

For more information visit https://www.stanleygreenspan.com/ 

TheraSuit Method®
  • The TheraSuit is a soft dynamic proprioceptive orthosis that allows the use of bungees to be used to promote postural alignment. TheraSuit aims to promote alignment by re-educating muscle and motor movements to normalise muscle tone, sensory feedback and balance. Improve balance
  • Improve coordination
  • Support weak muscles
  • Develop fine and gross motor skills
  • Maintain head control and trunk support to improve speech production and fluency

 It is designed and recommend for people diagnosed with:

  • Cerebral palsy
  • Developmental delays
  • Down Syndrome
  • Spina Bifida
  • Traumatic Brain Injury
  • Sensory Processing Disorders
  • Muscle Tone Disorders
  • And other Neurological Disorders

At All Together Therapy, our TheraSuit program is delivered on a one-on-one basis with an experienced and qualified Physiotherapist or Occupational Therapist.  The program typically runs 2-3hrs per day, 5 days per week for up to 3 weeks depending on the client’s individual needs.

The TheraSuit allows us to work with clients address goals such as:

  • Re-training sensory motor pathways and motor planning.
  • Manage muscle tone and develop motor patterns other than reflexes
  • Improve balance, coordination
  • Support weak muscles, through strengthening and increasing endurance
  • Increase body awareness
  • Develop fine and gross motor skills
  • Maintain head control and trunk support to improve speech production and fluency
Spider Cage (Universal Exercise Unit)

The Spider cage is a suspension system, which works with the use of belts, bungee cords and pulleys allowing the child to be supported and receive additional sensory motor feedback. Creating a supported and dynamic environment to work on functional skills to promote goal attainment.

The spider cage allows children to experience antigravity movements, it also allows a child to maintain postural alignment without hands on assistance from the therapist. Therefore, allowing the child and therapist the capacity to focus on specific movements and functional skills.  Exercises performed in full or partial weight bearing created by bungee suspension allows the child to develop a sense of security. This method also facilitates the development of functional skills (sitting, crawling, standing, walking, climbing, jumping etc.). Whilst in suspension, the child practices different activities that help promote sensory regulation.

The Spider Cage allows us to work with children to promote:

  • Increase strength
  • Increase range of motion (active and passive range of motion))
  • Isolate desired (weakened) muscle or muscle groups and strengthen them to enable function
  • Improve balance and coordination
  • Assist upright position and posture
  • Partial or full weight bearing
  • Promote motor learning and motor planning
  • Provide a variety of sensory regulation experiences
  • Assist to develop a sense of security and success
  • With the overall goal of developing key motor and sensory skills to promote goal attainment.

 

 

Sounds-Write

Sounds-Write is a quality first phonics programme. Its purpose is to provide classroom professionals with a comprehensive system with which to teach reading, spelling and writing.  It teaches all key elements of conceptual understanding, factual knowledge, and the three essential skills of blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation necessary for learning to read and spell and it does so until all children achieve the automaticity that underlies the fluency of every successful reader. The Sounds-Write programme teaches pupils to understand the way the alphabet code works. Very often, in the early stages of learning to read and spell, because of the complexity of the code, pupils will not be able to spell some sounds by using the correct spellings. However, pupils taught using Sounds-Write will be able to write almost anything they want to write by using plausible (phonetic) spellings for sounds. In this way, pupils, teachers and parents can read anything the pupil has written. 

For more information visit https://www.sounds-write.co.uk/ 

SOS Feeding

The SOS Approach to Feeding stands for Sequential-Oral-Sensory because these are the major components of the program. SOS uses a transdisciplinary team (Pediatricians, Occupational Therapists, Registered Dietitians, and Speech Pathologists/Therapists) to evaluate and treat the “whole child” including: 

  • Organ systems
  • Muscles (including oral motor)
  • Sensory processing
  • Learning, behaviour and cognition
  • Development
  • Nutrition
  • Environment

Based on and grounded philosophically in the “normal” developmental steps, stages and skills of feeding found in typically developing children, the SOS Approach focuses on increasing a child’s comfort level by exploring and learning about the different properties of food. The program allows a child to interact with food in a playful, non-stressful way, beginning with the ability to tolerate the food in the room and in front of him/her, then moving on to managing the smell of the foods, learning about how foods feel on the body and in their mouth, and then enjoying tasting and eating new foods following the Steps to Eating. 

For more information visit https://sosapproachtofeeding.com/ 

Learn to Play

The aim of Learn to Play Therapy is to build the spontaneous pretend play ability of children. Learn to Play focusses on pretend play, as this type of play is the most complex and mature form of play. Pretend play also impacts on language (particularly narrative language), social interaction, and emotional integration of the child’s experiences. The play skills that are the focus of Learn to Play Therapy are: ability to spontaneously self-initiate play, sequencing play actions logically, using objects as something else (object substitution or symbols in play), engaging with a doll or teddy character outside of themselves, integrating their play so a clear play script is evident, role play and socially interacting using play.  

For more information visit https://www.learntoplayevents.com 

Neuro-Developmental Treatment (NDT)

Neuro-Development Treatment (NDT) is a type of therapy used by physical, occupational, and speech-language therapists for individuals with movement and muscle control challenges. These motor control issues are typically referred to as neuro-motor or neuromuscular dysfunction, and can seriously affect body movement, muscle control, muscle coordination, posture and balance. Individuals with neuromuscular dysfunctions have unique needs which is why Neuro Developmental Therapy was developed and is now used by many of the therapists specializing in working with these individuals.

NDT is:

  • An advanced 'hands-on' therapeutic approach that helps guide the individual to more efficient functional abilities. It utilizes principles of motor development, motor control, motor learning, and other supporting scientific principles to improve basic body functions.
  • Engaging and motivating. Our goal is client motivation through intervention that includes ‘hands-on’ physical guidance strategies, verbal cues, and feedback, gradually adjusting over time according to client’s needs and emerging skills. 
  • With the client and family at the center, the therapist uses a proven, industry-standard model to assess activity and participation in daily routines. Then, building on the client’s functional strengths, the NDT therapist identifies movement problems and, along with the family and client, sets achievable goals to improve function. (definition from https://www.ndta.org/Community/Frequently-Asked-Questions)

For more information please visit https://www.ndta.org/

Sense Rugby

We are a proud provider of Sense Rugby – an Occupational Therapy based sensory group that uses Rugby Activities and Drills to develop a range of motor, social and cognitive skills. This group is designed to empower children to engage in a group environment whilst developing skills and working towards inclusion in mainstream sports.

For more information on Sense Rubgy visit http://www.senserugby.com.au/ 

Reaching Goals Together