The Early Years Service

Our Early Years Occupational Therapy team works with children from birth (where appropriate) to aged 5, supporting them to get the very best out of daily activities.

Daily activities include learning through play, dressing, washing and mealtimes. We work with families to identify why these activities may be difficult and help to improve children’s skills and independence. This may be by providing advice and recommendations for home and nursery or by working directly with the child and their family.

We see children with functional concerns, for example using cutlery, dressing, pencil skills and using scissors. We can offer advice for children experiencing sensory difficulties.

We look at the seating needs for those children that require support with posture, enabling them to be able to engage in functional daily activities.

We can accept referrals for children being discharged from hospital that need on-going support, or for children with a high level of complex need.

 

Our Early Years Physiotherapy team sees children from birth (where appropriate) to aged 5. We provide specialist assessment, advice and intervention to assist children with positioning, movement and balance.

Interventions are always target based and goal focused.

We aim to educate and empower families, supporting them to manage their child’s difficulties. Support and advice are provided to help children to integrate into community groups such as swimming and soft play.

We provide information and reassurance around the development of normal gross motor skills.

Our Rapid Response team provides a service for children in Greenwich, who present with certain conditions, namely: as a newborn, those that require respiratory assessment and treatment, those that require a short intensive block of specific rehabilitation or to facilitate a safe early discharge home from hospital.

MOVE Programme

The MOVE Programme is an activity-based framework that combines family life, education and therapy to enable young people to gain independent sitting, standing, walking and transferring skills.

Our MOVE team have been awarded a MOVE Centre of Excellence accredited status. This is awarded to organisations who have demonstrated, through extensive and robust evidence, that they are using the MOVE Programme in the most effective way. Our MOVE Team is the first Health Service to achieve this in both the UK and Europe.

 

Specialist SLT service

Our Early Years Speech and Language Therapy team provides assessment and specialist therapy for children from birth (where appropriate) until the end of nursery.

We see children who are having significant difficulty with:

• Pronunciation
• Understanding and using words and sentences
• Social communication difficulties and/or Autism
• Stammering
• Refusing to talk in certain situations
• Swallowing
• Hearing Impairment/deafness

A family may attend for;

• assessment only
• assessment and review
• assessment and a short set of therapy sessions