Valerie Cribbin, senior occupational therapist at the Lucena Clinic in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
I work from 9 a.m to 5 p.m., five days a week. I work with children about three days in the working week and spend the rest of the time on administration, which includes carrying out assessments, visiting the children in school and programme planning, and team meetings. The Lucena Clinic is a child and adolescent mental health service run by the St John of God Order.
On a typical day, I see the children for one hour-long appointment each. Usually the children are accompanied by a parent. I prefer this because there are tasks I need the parents to carry out with their children throughout the week. Sometimes I see the children in groups.
I have always worked with children and have been using an approach called Sensory Integration for the past 16 years.
Sensory Integration is a therapy and intervention process that helps children with difficulties take in, sort out, process and make use of information from the world about them and from within their own bodies. It is very helpful for children with ADHD, specific learning difficulties and developmental co-ordination difficulties as well as Autism and Asperger's Syndrome. I get a high number of children referred to me between the ages of three and seven but, unfortunately, we currently have a very long waiting list. We do our best to prioritise the children who have the greatest need and deal with acute symptoms such as depression and anxiety that need our immediate attention - symptoms that therapy can help to alleviate.
My aim as an occupational therapist is to increase to the maximum possible the child's ability to function independently in his/her environment. To do so, I look at the areas of difficulty, try to discover the causes and work with these to resolve the difficulty. This applies to everything from playing with friends, to tying shoelaces, to handwriting. In the latter for instance, I may discover that the problem is with sitting at a desk and once I help the child achieve a good sitting posture, the hand-writing will improve. It is very exciting when you discover that you've worked on a foundation skill to resolve another difficulty.
Helping the child to develop gross and fine motor skills is part of my work and following the sensory integration approach, I use suspended equipment quite a bit. Taking gravity away, the child's nervous system has to respond in a new way to the challenges that are posed by the equipment and the therapist. The child develops new skills while playing, perhaps catching and throwing a ball at a target while moving in the net-swing, or lying on his tummy on the flat swing.
Some children I see have a high level of anxiety or are depressed because they can't socialise with their peers. Sometimes, because of their poor co-ordination, they can't join in games. They may then rigidly stick with tasks they can do because their fear of failure is so high. The beauty of sensory integration is that it is child-directed and they can be successful if I give them the correct challenges. Autistic children really make contact with others and communicate when using this treatment approach and equipment.
I get great joy from working with children because of their openness and honesty. It's lovely to observe the development of their sense of confidence and working out their own ideas. One child said to me once that he'd like to be an occupational therapist because we play all day long. It's true we do play - but it is play with a purpose which is based on the most researched area of occupational therapy.
(Interview by Sylvia Thompson)