Choosing a Speech Therapist
Congratulations on making the decision to improve your child’s life. It’s no exaggeration to say that choosing a speech therapist can be profound, life changing decision. To help, we’ve pulled together a bit of a guide based on our experiences and from talking to some of the families we work with. It’s some general guidelines about our service that will hopefully make the decision easier for you.
The right training for your problem
While there are often many approaches to solve every therapy problem, not all approaches are created equal. Some have more evidence to support them than others. Ask your speech therapist how they will address your child’s problem and how they can be sure that their approach has a good chance of success. Read up and understand the approaches used by your speech therapist so you know what’s going on. Also, feel free to ask your therapist if they have any experience working with whatever issue your child has. You should expect a clear and detailed answer.
Our Speech Therapists are Fun
This means there should be a focus on fun, variety and a good sense of humour. Fun is important because speech therapy is not a punishment, it’s for children to get better. Also, the research shows that everyone learns better while having fun. We do not require that your young child sit still the entire session. We’re flexible enough to change therapy to fit your child and your situation.
Our Speech Therapists Don’t Stagnate
We won’t continue for months and months with no improvement. If you’re going nowhere, it’s time to change it up, or you’ll stagnate. When you stagnate, you spend time practicing what isn’t working and spend time, money and effort bedding in something that does not work. You can bore your child and run the risk of seeing avoidance behaviours, like tantrums, pretending to be ill and so on to avoid therapy. We review all our clients every few weeks with the aim of finding areas where we can do better and then doing better.
You Need a Speech Therapy Plan
Do you make a list to go shopping? Would you put together a bit of a plan to fit in a trip to the doctor before school? If the answer is yes, why wouldn’t you expect a plan when you’re about to spend time and money to make your child better? A plan puts together the goals you are working towards, expected outcomes, who will do what and, importantly, when you will check on progress. It protects you from wasting time, effort and money to no end. It doesn’t have to be written down, but it needs to exist somewhere.
Our Speech Therapists Respect You
Our speech therapists respect you, your needs and your opinions. This means we make an effort to accommodate you if you are not of the same mind on an issue. We won’t tell you, we will explain to you, so you will be secure in your understanding. Your child is important and you deserve respect. This also means funding that you have to support your child will be respected. We don’t have admin fees and other charges that aren’t stated up front. When you call, you will be able to speak to someone who is able to listen to what you have to say and either answer your questions or arrange a time to talk to someone who can, without charge.
Our Speech Therapists Work With Others
Our speech therapists have a good understanding of your child as a whole person. That means while they are knowledgable in speech therapy, they have enough training and professional development to identify and recognise other problems relating to their core area of knowledge and advise you if you need to address them. This means, for example, children with a sensory or physical problem limiting their progress will be identified and you’ll be advised if you need more help. We won’t focus exclusively on speech therapy when it comes to helping your child. When other therapists are engaged as well as speech, we make every effort to work with them and be available to provide advice and support.
Our Service Standards
These are the standards we hold ourselves to and we hope you find them acceptable. We always put our clients first and we’re proud to say we work very hard for their benefit.
