Video transcript
Nicole Telfer (she/her, disability and inclusion practitioner): Family-centred practice is about the way that the team works with you and your family. It’s putting your family’s and your child’s need at the centre and working in ways that are effective and work for your family. It’s based on partnership, where you're coming together and working as a team.
Dee (parent of Max and Oscar): Family-centred practice for us really means looking at how the supports that are given to Max support the family and the relationships within that family as a whole. Because focusing in just on Max ignores the facts that he’s part of a unit. Whenever I engage with service providers, it is very much the interview. Before I’m even interested in getting on their waitlist, I have a series of questions I want to know the answer to, one of which is, how do you feel about working with a queer family that’s positively neurodiverse. We do not see neurodiversity as a deficit. We are proudly queer. My children have two mums. Is that something that you can work with?
Caz (parent of Sam): In regards to how service providers approach our family, they clearly identify me as Sam’s mum, and Sam is a child with a disability who needs assistance. I would engage an agency to work with us as a family. The therapist comes to the house, and they engage Sam. I’m there with. I can see what's happening. And I can learn from what's happening in that process. A child like Sam doesn't learn from an hour of therapy. He learns from ongoing intervention surrounded around him. He almost needs to be immersed into it. And in order to do that, you have to engage the family, and you have to teach the parent how to assist Sam on a daily basis.
Nicole Telfer: Family-centred practice is important because it builds on your family’s strengths, and it helps your child work within their real life.
Dee: Supporting Max also means making sure that Tash and I and Oscar are all being supported as well. And that can look like including Oscar in some of Max’s therapy sessions. So for example, one of Max’s current goals is around building his relationship with his brother. So that needs a little bit of intervention and teaching them how to play together so that they don’t just bash heads very quickly.
Nicole Telfer: Family-centred practice should feel safe and comfortable, like you're being heard, where your choices and your needs are respected, where you don’t need to justify or explain yourself or your family. And it involves the people you want involved, those who are important to your family.
Dee: A lot of our experiences are really positive, and I think that comes back to how carefully we engage providers. I very much look at us as a team. And if people aren't willing to be a team player, then it's never going to work out for us because I need everybody pulling together, including Tash, Oscar, and I. So roughly, once a quarter, I have a call with all Max’s support workers and all his current therapists to just cover off the goals we’re working on and where Max is at in terms of his needs and basically where he’s working at at the time. We also have a WhatsApp group with that same group of people, so I can share information with them just once, and I don’t need to keep repeating it.
Caz: Sam is nonverbal. And initially, he actually didn't have any communication method at all. That's something that has come over time, and it's something that I’ve learned a lot from therapists in terms of how to give him that ability to communicate. And it's working really well. We understand each other now because we’ve had this ability, because we’ve had this training to teach us how we can communicate with each other.
Dee: Family-centred practice has to be the way we work moving forward. In my view, if Max was somebody else’s child, what his needs were would be different. You can’t deal with a person in any capacity, disability or otherwise, as an island.