Community children's physiotherapy service one minute guide
What is a physiotherapist?
Physiotherapists work in all areas of the health service. Physiotherapists help to maximize function and movement when someone is affected by injury, illness or disability.
Some children’s physiotherapists work in hospitals and help children after an operation, illness or broken bones. Others work in the community and help children with longer-term problems or disabilities.
Who are Leeds Children’s Community Physiotherapy?
Our team of children’s physiotherapists and physiotherapy work in the three ICAN Service Hubs; St George’s Centre (South), Reginald Centre (East) and Wortley Beck (West).
We also work in various settings across the city, including the Child Development Centres,
Specialist Inclusive Learning Centres (SILC schools), mainstream schools and nurseries and the child’s home.
Which children do we work with?
Children aged 0 to 19 years with long term neurological and developmental conditions, for example, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophies, developmental delay, developmental coordination
disorders, syndromes.
We do not work with:
- children with acute respiratory or acute orthopaedic conditions or injuries.
How do we work with you and your child?
We want to empower children and their families to feel in control of their care. We do this by working together with each family to see what is best for them.
All children will have a physiotherapy assessment after the referral is accepted. There are different types of assessment depending on your child’s needs, however all assessments will include:
- Talking about what you want from the assessment, and you or your child’s goals and aspirations.
- Finding out about your child’s developmental history and current abilities, what is going well, what is not going well and what could be better.
- An assessment of your child’s physical skills.
- Discussing our findings, setting goals and agreeing a clear plan.
What do we provide?
- Support for children and their families to participate in everyday life.
- Specialist assessment and analysis of movement difficulties and how to reduce possible future complications.
- Specialist treatment based on current evidence. This can include:
- Advice on activities that can be incorporated in to everyday home and school routines.
- Individual exercise or positioning programmes.
- Specialist equipment and orthotics.
- Specialist interventions, for example, hydrotherapy, rebound therapy.
- Specialist advice, information and training to children and young people, parents and
carers, education staff and other healthcare professionals. - Healthy lifestyle advice.
- Liaison and joint work with other healthcare professionals and agencies.
Who can refer to the service?
- Community paediatricians
- GPs
- Health visitors and other allied health professionals, for example, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists
Note:
- We do not accept new referrals from parents, however parents of children who have
previously been seen by our service can self-refer back to our service if needed. - We do not accept referrals from schools or school nurses.
What happens when my child no longer needs
physiotherapy?
- Your child may be discharged if:
- they have achieved their goals (and there are no new ones) or the plan for working on their goals is in place
- you and your child no longer want to have physiotherapy
- physiotherapy is not benefitting your child
- you and your child have not attended appointments or contacted the service
- advice is not being followed.
- Some children may be discharged on a “passport” system, enabling you to self-refer back to physiotherapy if new goals arise in the future.
