Occupational Therapy Intensive
Intensive therapy is a way of delivering a high ‘dose’ or a high amount of therapy over a short period of time. For example, a child might attend a block of intensive therapy where they have therapy sessions every day for between 1-3 hours, for 1-3 weeks. The Occupational Therapy Intensive Programs which run both in term and during the school holiday periods at Zoom Therapy Services and is a program that yields great results for children and teens. Developmental areas children and teens include and are not limited to improvements in communication and interactive capacities, improvements in sensory processing, improvements in mediation of arousal state and self regulatory capacities, improvements in motor skill development and improvements in overall behaviour including decreased patterns of anxiety and over-responsivity, decrease in rigid inflexible behaviour, improvements in ability to maintain calm state and recover from events and improvements in participation in many home and school routines. A primary part of the program utilises a sound-based intervention in combination with sensori-motor supports together with parent consultation and education and preparing home programs in order to ensure transition of concepts within the home environment.
What is an Intensive?
The intensive model of treatment has been devised to support children in their progress and
development. These programs are highly individualised and are a dynamic form of service delivery
based on child and family participation across the week. The focus areas for each program are
different and are dependent on goal areas outlined by the family and the child’s individual
functioning and needs.
This program involves a client attending 2 hour sessions a day for a period of 5 days, this
equates to 10 hours of intervention at the end of the 5 day period. This timeframe is equivalent to a
10 week term of intervention – but in a more condensed format. Attending the full 10 hours is
suggested in order to achieve maximum benefit for individual needs.
Intensive Therapy Benefits
Using the Intensive mode format as part of a child’s intervention programming can yield great benefits for overall goal acquisition. The program has been developed based on research that supports the use of specific targeted intervention over condensed time frame in order to boost skills development, attain a more settled state for the individual based on engagement in organising supports in a condensed manner, practice of concepts in high repetition, work from fatigue to support nervous system organisation and settling and building muscle tone and postural organisation/control to support skill development. This program also allows for therapist to more closely ascertain arousal/attention presentation across multiple times of the day which further helps support home and school based program development as a greater ‘snapshot’ of functioning can be captured day to day this then allows for the program to be more dynamic in nature but also then allows for home program ideas to be suggested based on the specific needs of the child.
The program is developed based on the individual child’s goal areas as well as what has been highlighted by the family to be areas of concerns. Generally, an Intensive Program can help to support better mediation of arousal and attention levels, will support neural integration and sensory processing, will help with children understanding which supports can be used to help to calm or help to feel more alert or awake. This can support the development of more mature self- regulation skills which can help a child to better manage their attention, anxiety levels, emotions, motivations and productivity.
