So last episode, we talked about getting the most from your Allied Health professionals. This episode, I thought we might lean more into that topic of care teams because we are seeing a significant increase in the number of kids that are, getting diagnosed with disabilities earlier, but also kids that have got pretty significant developmental delays, whether there's speech and language issues at play regulation or behavior issues, self-care, toileting, sleep.
Medical issues, all sorts of different things on the rise for lots of the kids across our settings. And so gone are the days when it was just one or two kids in in a class or in a group that had developmental delay or disability. What we're seeing now is it could be as many as half the group and.
That can be really time consuming. There's obviously the extra paperwork involved in trying to get funding, and we'll do a video a recording soon on what funding looks like and breaking it down by state and talking about the some of the. Tips and tricks, I suppose, to give you the best chance of getting funding in the early year space to support these kids in early learning, because it is particularly challenging to get that over the line for many of the kids that we're working with because they just don't have the evidence and the documentation behind them outside of the work that you're doing with them.
But let's start now by looking at care teams, and again, we, I mentioned. Multiple times over these episodes that. You really, there's no shortcut really to putting in the time at the start with families and taking that time to really understand their needs, understand the challenges they're having at home, the dynamics of what's going on at home, their worries, the more safe.
Families feel the more open. They tend to be about what their worries are, but otherwise if we don't make them feel safe enough, then they tend to not share some of that really important information. Be for fear and it can be the most bizarre. And no doubt. You guys have plenty of examples of this, the most bizarre things that they haven't shared because they were frightened of how it would be received and.
I don't know if there's any real shortcuts to getting that relationship to a point where families feel safe enough to share this information and it does just take a bit of time. So, and the other thing I suppose about relationships is that we don't want our families just to have a good relationship with one of our team members.
We really want them to have a good relationship with all of our team members. Just that on its own is gonna get these kids and these families better outcomes. Because the family's gonna feel understood and supported. And then it makes everything easier from having these tricky conversations when you're first identifying that their kids might be needing additional support to feeling understood and heard and respected when you're pulling the care team together and making some recommendations.
So. As we spoken to earlier, one of the downsides of the NDIS since it's rolled out is that there's often no one coordinating these care teams. And occasionally you'll have a great health professional that will come in and assume that role. Sometimes there's a key worker or a support coordinator in place or a family like family care style worker in involved to help coordinate that.
But I would say more often than not, that's lagging. And so then, where. It can be most beneficial for you as a service provider and for the family and the child that you're working with is if you step into that role. And I know you don't have the time for it, I totally appreciate that. But being able to have a little bit more control around what's happening in that space is gonna support you to get the best outcomes 'cause.
Often these kids take up a significant amount of your time one way or another. And so being in the driver's seat of what that looks like when it happens, how it happens can actually save significant amounts of time in the long run. And it can give your team and your family the support that they need, which everyone's gonna be appreciative of.
So let's talk about what it takes to set up a good team care team. And number one, understanding what's happening for the family. That's the first thing. Two, getting a sense of who else is involved. Child's care. Is there physio, OT speech? Do they have a pediatrician? How complex is the situation that they're with?
How engaged is the pediatrician? Thirdly, getting a shared, getting consent, I suppose, to have a shared email that goes out to all of these people to say, Hey, let's schedule a time to catch up about such and such. Propose something for once a term. Try and keep it consistent. We are catching up on the first Tuesday of each term at x time.
And if you can't be there, please submit your summary of what it is that you're working on, what sort of funds you've got allocated, where you're planning to work on that da. Getting all of that information to you, even if those people can't be present in the meetings, what you'll often find is for the kids where it really matters, these people will go out of their way to turn up.
You'll see the pediatrician will get there, you'll see the speechy, the ot, because everyone knows that these is, this is how we get best outcomes for kids. People are craving this sort of coordinated support so that they know that everyone's on the same page. They just haven't had the time, the space, the capacity, the confidence to be able to pull it all together.
So keeping those meetings really focused is important. They can easily blow out if there's no clear agenda and if people aren't, if the expectations aren't clear at the start of the meeting. And so setting boundaries around the timeframe. We've got 45 minutes for this meeting. Everyone has time for a five minute summary of where you are up to and for us to identify two to three goals that we are gonna work on.
Generally start with a summary from the parent at the start. So, and being really clear, Jenny, you've got five minutes. Give us land, the plane, give us a rundown. What's happening at home? What are the biggest challenges? What are you needing support with? Getting that sense straight up. Then helps everyone lead into, okay.
OTs turn. What is biggest challenge you faced? The success that you've had in whatever area, focus areas for the next little while, resources that you've got to enact that. What do you need from us going around the room, getting that clarity from each of the people that are involved. Then summarizing at the end.
Okay. What I'm hearing is we've got this common challenge. These are the barriers that we are facing. These are the things that are going really well and the things we've seen improvements on. These are the things that we need to look at, how we are going to address. And then checking in that's something that everyone has agreed is what's happening.
And then circling back around to say, okay, what are our priority steps between now and the next meeting? And what do you need from me? And. Asking each person to have a two minute wrap up of this is what I'm going to do, this is what I need from whoever else is involved to make that happen. A summary at the end of this is what that looks like.
Potentially, if you've got consent using Gemini or one of those AI tools that is taken, that the meeting notes and summarize that for everyone at the end that gets distributed out to everybody. And then. At the next meeting, we are spending a couple of minutes to start checking in. This is what we said we were gonna do.
How's your progress been on this? How's Johnny tracking on these goals? Do we need new goals this time? Mom land the plane and resetting that, that those same expectations again. Having those shorter meetings and you at the start, you might need them. Sometimes you might need them once a month, but more often than not, once a term is enough, and then you might be able to extend them out.
If you've got a pretty stable sort of condition, you've got a pretty stable care team, then it may be enough to have those, just even once or twice a year over the course of those years when you're coming up to something that's a major transition, like transitioning into a 4-year-old kinder program in a different setting or transitioning to school, then the dynamic's gonna change a little bit and.
What you wanna see when you're transitioning to school is you're probably gonna start to have those conversations at 3-year-old kinder, so we are clear on what schools we're looking at and where, what the process has been around that. And then at the start of that 4-year-old kinder year, starting to have those conversations.
Are we gonna look for a second year at kinder or are we going to look to go straight into school? And then. From term two onwards, getting the school involved. What does the school need to need from a transition point of view? Are there gonna be extra transition visits at the school? Are the school gonna come on site and have a look at what's happening here?
What do we need from a paperwork point of view? And so, there's that extra segment. I suppose it's needed in these care team meetings when we are looking at those those transition points. So I don't think it needs to be hugely onerous time-wise. I think that the more decisive you are and the clearer you are, and these are the expectations, this is what we can offer.
A lot of the time, if you give enough notice people will be able to work around those expectations that you have and to be able to to, if not, if they can't be there in person to contribute their their dot points to the meeting to be able to make something that's. Best practice for the child and most supportive for the family and for you, and gives everyone some super focused areas of what it is that we're working on and how we're getting at the most out of the funding that this, that these kids have.
If you've got any questions about that or you're keen to access some checklists or some some meeting agendas, some guidance on how to roll this out. In your service, in a way that you feel really confident about some scripts on how to have these conversations with the care team to get these set up and running, please check out our educator hub or reach out for more information.
