a team approach

Apr 21

I’m going to see if I can do this analogy justice, so bear with me…

When we think about a child’s education, we first think about the primary subjects: reading, math, science.

But these subjects don’t operate in silos in school, and rightly so.

Reading is necessary to take in new information, no matter the topic. Math and science open up the mind to measuring, problem solving and critical thinking… in later stages, so do English and humanities, when a student learns to dissect literature and analyze rhetoric.

What if somebody told you that the following was your only choice for your child’s education?

You need to drive your child to one building to learn math, to another to learn English.
They may or may not have access to science, music, art. If they do, that’ll be an extra cost and a third location.
Nobody teaching your child will communicate with one another.
There are no substitutes, so your sessions might fall through at any time, and everybody will be burnt out from overwork.
You’ll need to do about fifty pages of paperwork a quarter in order to cover the costs.
You might want to start studying the new language of state acronyms.
AND there’s a six to nine month waitlist to get in.

You’d probably hear that and say… “That’s one heck of a broken system.”

What about home room? Lunch? Extracurricular activities? Recess? Health? P.E.? All the little learning opportunities in between the classwork?

What if one child is struggling to read, but the science teacher has no idea and wonders why the child never turns their homework in?

Without support for the staff, how is burnout prevented?

What about the strain on families? Lack of consistency and transportation?

Now… imagine this with an even more vulnerable population, with children who need a higher level of specialized support in order to learn and grow.

With families who are already straining to accommodate a full time job’s worth of therapy hours (30-40 per week in the early years). Not to mention those who have multiple children with varying support needs.

This displacement of services, this broken system… this is the norm for pediatric therapy right now. This is what parents of children with autism and different abilities are working with… in the best of cases.

And we’re all still trying to do it because we know this is what our kids need from us. Because we see the research that says early intervention is absolutely key to the overall quality of life outcomes for our kids.

What about developmental and special education programs in schools? Don’t they work across disciplines, designed as a team approach?

Designed like that? Yes.

Executed like that? Rarely.

Schools have an entirely different host of limitations, from a lack of funding, to being constrained by the requirement that all goals be tailored to academic achievement.

While I raise my glass to the hardworking heroes in public special education, there’s so much more we can be doing for kiddos with different abilities to improve outcomes.

But, just imagine what a team approach in pediatric therapy could look like. What if everything was in one place? What if the whole needs of the child and family were taken into consideration from the moment they first walk in the door?

Early on in our therapy journey with our daughter, I realized that, while three of the four members of her therapy team were under one roof, they didn’t communicate with each other much. They didn’t compare session notes or goals.

Part of this was because, in a way, they were speaking different languages. One single event could be described as “dysregulation,” “non-compliance,” or “a lack of reciprocity,” depending on the field. But it all meant essentially the same thing.

There also isn’t much transition time given to therapists, so there’s always this frazzled pass-off and run to a next client.

I asked, one year, for her entire team to come together for a meeting. I wanted to see what would happen when we tried to get everybody on the same page.

Within five minutes, we realized that two of the therapists were trying to address the same problem, with opposing techniques. They were, in effect, sabotaging each other.

And all I could think was, how confusing must that be for my daughter? How inefficient and what a waste of her time, what a waste of the valuable energy of her team. But this wasn’t their fault.

Their approach was a direct result of the way the therapy system is designed to work.

Alright, almost there… one more Reduce to the Ridiculous kind of comparison:

If somebody said, what’s the best way to teach a child?

You wouldn’t respond, “History is the only subject my child needs.”

Nor would you say, “I’m only going to teach my child to count, but not read.”

This would, again, seem absurd.

So why, oh why, is this the approach to pediatric therapy?

Why is it so common for parents and clinicians alike to say something like, “This child only needs speech to learn to communicate?”

Is not a regulated child (occupational therapy), more capable of accessing communication?

Is not a motivated child (behavioral therapy), more reinforced in their communication attempts?

Is not a stronger child (physical therapy), more empowered to have their voice heard? To do for themselves to begin with?

Is not an informed and supported family (caregiver support programs), more able to facilitate communication with their own child?

You know what really stood out to me the most in those early years? With all our own testing and tracking and data (have you figured out that I’m a nerd yet?)... we found that no one therapy was, in and of itself, enough.

No one discipline was the best.

They all served to be just one piece of our daughter’s road to success, to growth.

And when we got those vehicles to work together, to merge lanes (think zipper merge, not selfish road-rage merge), we saw our daughter’s growth take off.

We saw it work.

We saw her thrive.

This is why we are so passionate about providing a holistic, multi-disciplinary approach at BloomKidz.

It’s why we’re building in extra transition windows for all our clinicians, so that they have time to overlap for co-treat sessions and internal communication.

It’s why we’re accounting for extra staff at all times.

It’s why we’re creating parent learning modules and additional internal trainings for our staff that help the different disciplines learn to talk to one another.

It’s why we’re allocating time to team meetings that include caregivers.

It’s why we’re building in parent co-working stations and mentorship programs.

I don’t know what the answer is for why these things aren’t already being done, at least not widely so, or in a way that can be studied and learned from.

Perhaps it’s because it requires bringing people of very different backgrounds to a table and doing the hard work of getting them on the same page.

But I will say this… I have to believe that that hard work?

That’s the good work.

That’s the work that’s most worth doing… coming to a table, time and again, and building a team—scratch that, building a community of support around children with higher needs and their families.

That’s the work that’s going to count.

That’s the work we’re taking on with BloomKidz.