Continuity of Care
Happy New Year! As we slowly and carefully enter 2022, take our shoes off at the door, bring a hostess gift and politely ask her to be kind to us, it’s time to think about resolutions. Before you go setting those high expectations for yourself for exercise or clean eating or weight loss (guilty!!!) please take some time to read through our previous posts on parental burnout, coping skills, and self-care. This year, a great parenting resolution could be to find some things that we can do in the new year to help our children recover from two very strange years and get the most out of their education, and any other professional services they may receive.
Continuity of care is a term that is used in the medical field, the school environment, as well as in applied behavior analysis. This term makes an appearance in all of our documents and reports that we write, and is constantly discussed among professionals, but what does it mean? Let’s talk about what it means for children with and without special needs. The American Academy of Family Physicians defines it as the “process by which the patient and his/her physician-led care team are cooperatively involved in ongoing health care management toward the shared goal of high quality, cost-effective medical care.”
With any complex diagnosis that our children may receive, autism included, an entire team of people begin to work with you and your child to deliver a variety of treatments. ABA therapy is only one of the services that your child can and should receive. There is a possibility to have a team that consists of ABA (a supervisor, program director, behavior technicians, etc.), speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, special education teachers, teachers aides in the classroom, a developmental pediatrician, a neurologist, a psychiatrist, the list can go on and on and on.
Typically developing children also have a team of people at any given time that are responsible for contributing to their success. At school they may have several teachers who see them every day. Speech therapists see children with and without formal diagnoses in the school environment. If English is not the first language spoken in your home, your child may have an ESL teacher who sees them each week. If they are struggling with the transition back to in-person learning I’m willing to bet the school psychologist is there to help and has a wealth of helpful information for you and your child. If they are a bit behind in reading or math they may go to a different teacher’s classroom for specialized instruction. These things are happening more and more across the board as educators are working hard to catch kids up on anything they may have missed over the last two years.
Continuity of care calls for any professional working on behalf of an individual to be on the same page. This is nearly impossible without everyone getting on the same bus and heading in the same direction. The question then becomes, who is driving this bus? The answer does not have to be you. If your child receives ABA therapy, the program supervisor can absolutely drive that bus, it is part of our job to ensure that continuity of care occurs across all providers. If your child is only receiving school-based services, your child’s head classroom teacher can drive that bus for you. All you have to do is ask.
Why is it important to have a bus driver? Overlap of services occurs across all disciplines, and when it comes to the development of your child, we’re all working on communication, behavior, washing hands, toilet training, holding a pencil correctly, the list goes on and on. Each professional has a slightly different way to work on all of these things, so ensuring that we’re all moving in the same direction is key, and that the correct person is giving the bus driver directions for the correct skill. For example: your child engages in task avoidance by hiding under the table every time a demand is placed. The speech therapist may be handling the behavior one way, the special education teacher another way, the home ABA team another way, and grandma another way. By communicating behavior strategies across all providers we can make sure that we are all approaching a behavior in the exact same way so your child learns that there will be consistency across providers.
With language and communication, behavior analysis works on functional communication while speech therapists may be doing the same, just in different ways. The speech therapist can address motor difficulties with forming words and sounds while the ABA team works on using those sounds in a meaningful way. The speech therapist should be providing the direction on how to prompt for those sounds or some fun exercises to elicit the target sounds.
Coordination across all service providers can help your child make the most progress in the shortest amount of time possible, and as that is the goal for anyone working with you or your child, we are more than happy to meet, discuss, and collaborate. All you have to do is ask.
