Gosh what a whirlwind! The new year has started in the shadow of Covid 19 with the omicron strain peaking in Queensland, and all of a sudden what we all thought of as the risk of catching covid, has turned into the very real probability of catching it. I had only been back to work for less than a week before catching covid and seeing it make its way through our family. That coupled with a relative passing away suddenly, basically the whole of January has been a bit of a false start to what we had planned to be a very jam packed year.
I thought it might be best to share with you our rationale for this big project in our first blog post. Then at the end I'm going to give you some updates on how its going as of the end of January.
I have always felt a little troubled when other providers would use the term 'Early Intervention' when referring to allied health therapy services offered to kids with ASD. While I acknowledge that these words can mean different things to different professionals, I believe the use of this has become a umbrella term for allied health therapy provided to children with Autism under the age of 6. While this use of the phrase in this way is technically correct, I noted that when I was reading research articles or books, they would refer to "Early Intervention" in a different way, referring to comprehensive programs that were transdisciplinary where parents, professionals and teachers work together for common goals in a holistic way. This was different to how others around me seemed to describe early intervention, which seemed to be more discipline specific and narrow in scope, basically accessing Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy or Psychology to support children with Autism with discipline-specific goals (i.e. Speech therapists working on communication, Psychologists only working on emotions and OTs only working on Occupations).
A few years ago, I was 'shooting the breeze' with a friend of mine (who also has a child with special needs) and we were chatting about the gap in services in our region. The Sunshine Coast Region has two great comprehensive early intervention programs/services who do great things for the kids engaged with them. However many parents were still hesitant to engage with these services due to their common underlying theoretical/clinical foundations - Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) therapy. High cost, service limitations, and lack of flexibility being additional factors reported by my clients causing hesitation to engage. I met with this friend a couple of times and we started chatting and making some preliminary plans to try to address this gap. However at that point in time, I was feeling content working as a sole practitioner, and he was busy with other projects, and the idea was parke
In 2020 my therapy business Collaborative Partnerships started a rapid period of growth. I had previously been avoiding expanding my service prior to this, purely out of my own self-centred desires to keep things simple for myself. As this was soon after the NDIS rollout, there were more kids than ever to see and I had found myself booked out in multiple consecutive years. The feelings of guilt for the kids sitting on my waitlist started to grow as I noticed some families were waiting for 6-12 months or longer to start accessing Occupational Therapy services. In 2020 I resolved to start recruiting, training and mentoring other practitioners who were as passionate about supporting kids as I am, with the ultimate goal of reaching more kids, and giving them the chance to access support sooner. This gave rise to our now ever increasing OT therapy team and our very in-demand Therapy Assistance program (TASC). In a particularly competitive employment environment, we were incredibly blessed to find some of the best practitioners I have had the honor of working with. One of these amazing staff was Joanne Macauley, who was at the time completing her certification in a model of comprehensive early intervention called the Early Start Denver Model, which is another comprehensive transdisciplinary early intervention program. Since working with Jo, I have been able to gain an appreciation for this amazing model and to see the potential it has to support a lot of kids. If you are interested in finding out more about the ESDM, check out our upcoming webinar here.
Fast forward a year or so to mid 2021, our therapy business has grown substantially and we have expanded both our clinic and our reach, supporting almost 500 additional children to access top quality allied health support via both OT and TASC program services. Around this time, I woke up one morning and the conversations I had had with my friend the year or so prior on comprehensive early intervention programs randomly came to mind. I had the thought, 'I must call him to chat about that again'. Little did I know that he had also had a similar prompting, and that very same day I got a message from him asking if I was ready to consider that project again. Within a short time, we had brought in some other key people to the project including Jo, and we made some plans and started the mammoth task of building a comprehensive early intervention service which would be the first of its kind (that we know of!) in Queensland.
Today, our mission remains the same, reach as many kids who need our support as possible. With that mission in mind, Kindred Kids Pty Ltd was formed as an entity to take on the task of building this new service.
In 2023, we will open a centre with two parallel services running. The first will be a mainstream daycare program, servicing children from 2-5 years of age for daycare and kindergarten services. This program will be called Olive Grove Early Learning. This name was chosen in tribute to my eldest daughter Olive, but also we considered 'Olive Grove' as many countries around the world rely on the production of precious olives (grown in grove based farms) for food, oil, medicine, light, textiles and more. Olive groves are a place where this precious life-sustaining fruit is cultivated, pressed and refined. Similarly, Olive Grove Early Learning will be a place where children are supported based on our guiding priorities: Child Development, Pre-Academic Learning, Sociality/Play are cultivated and refined to prepare children for a future life of learning, connection and success.
The second service is Kindred Kids Early Intervention. This will be an autism-specific early intervention and care service for children between ages 2-5 years. While Kindred Kids is is still a bonafide childcare centre, and will maintain a focus on development, learning, play and sociality. It's important to note that Kindred Kids will be different to Olive Grove in some key ways. These include:
Placement in rooms based on consideration to level of functioning in addition to age and size.
Higher staff to child ratios than is typical in the industry (generally 1:3 or 1:2 as needed)
Each room has a trained and experienced ESDM practitioner and multiple trained Therapy Assistants.
Each child will have a set therapy plan based on personalised ESDM goals. Each staff member will know and understand each child's individual goals.
Each child will have regular intervention provided in both small group and individual sessions while in care. Intervention will include 1:1 with the ESDM practitioner, and other sessions with the Therapy Assistants.
All children will benefit from a general structure and function in the rooms that is ASD friendly and all-inclusive.
As of the start of February, we are pleased to announce that we have had our child care provider approval granted by Education Queensland, and we are engaging a property developer to begin developing the land which will become our new centre. While I cant announce its location yet (we are still in the negotiation stage) I am excited to show you a draft of what our new centre might look like!
Right now, our central focus is to get the land, design the centre and as soon as possible, get construction started. I look forward to keeping you all in the loop of our progress. We are working as hard as we can to make sure the centre will open in Jan 2023 however we are keeping mindful that we need to stay flexible considering the craziness of the building industry. If you think your child might benefit from the Kindred Kids approach, then make sure you subscribe to our mailing list, also don't forget our upcoming free webinar which will be an introduction to the ESDM model and comprehensive early intervention coming up on the 22nd Feb. Stay tuned for more updates!
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