Issues with length of appointments for people who use communication aid (AAC)

forgoodnesssake

I'm not going to name and shame, but just want to flag up an issue that is currently affecting my adult son who has CP and uses AAC (no speech).  

He has some mental health issues which we have struggled to find the right support for (another story for another time) and over the last few months he has been accessing some online counselling from a disability counselling service that was recommended by the Bobath Centre and others (it is not the one that has a long post elsewhere on this board!)

I cannot comment on the quality of their provision but the thing that is proving extremely difficult to say the least, is that they flatly refuse to extend the duration of his appointments to allow for his much slower communication rate with using AAC and having very poor motor control.  This means basically that he gets about half the time of non-AAC users with the result that on quite a few occasions the session has ended when he is still in the middle of trying to deal with a difficult issue which can then trigger a MH episode afterwards.

I know that many people find that they would like more than an hour or so in a session, but that generally that time frame is thought to be about optimum...but my son is not able to utilise anything like that so is only really getting about 30 minutes, equivalent, which is not enough.

The organisation have been asked repeatedly about this being a reasonable adjustment (his GP always gives him a double appt, for example) but their response is just that they have made reasonable adjustment by making his course of appts open ended rather than say 15 sessions. 

But that entirely misses the point that in any one session he does not get enough time and also as he puts it, he then needs to sort of hang on to issues in his head and try to start the next session where he left off...which can actually prolong his anxiety or distress if the issue is a difficult one.

Of course this could also happen with a longer session, but at least he'd be on a par with a talking person!

Richard_Scope

Hi @forgoodnesssake

I don't think they grasp the issue here and are therefore not making adjustments reasonable or otherwise. Have you fed this back to the Bobath Centre?

forgoodnesssake

@Richard_Scope yes we have actually, and I am just about to email you with a bit more detail.