Create meaningful friendships
Become an active member of your community
Explore activities new to you
Learn new skills
Find new hobbies
Increase your community access
Have fun
Achieve NDIS goals with the support of the Therapy Care team
Our therapists and day programs manager are continuously thinking up new ways to level up our Group Day Program streams that support our participants' goals.
At Therapy Care, we lean on evidence-based practices and embrace innovation to improve the capacity of all of our participants.
Our risk-managed, forward-thinking Group Day Program is built to bring joy, challenge participants socially and increase their skillset.
Therapy Care individualises our programs to ensure we meet the needs of all participants. Our Group Day Program has the fundamental objectives of creating purposeful leisure and recreation activities both in house and within the community.
We separate participants into these three streams to ensure they are participating in activities that are of interest to them. This also enables people of all abilities to have the opportunity to build relationships, learn new skills and achieve their specific NDIS goals.
Our day program attendees look forward to participating in a fun and challenging activity each day and have developed wonderful friendships with fellow participants.
We rotate between a multitude of fun activities that support the development of our participants. Some of these activities include:
Boating
Pet Therapy
Inclusive Disability Events
Music Therapy
Art Therapy
Community Gardening
Bowling
BBQs
Bushwalks
“Our ‘Mind-full’ stream includes activities that promote mindfulness and recovery. This stream is tailored to participants who score high in stimulus avoidance during their leisure assessments, as we’ve identified they enjoy the atmosphere slower paced activities create,” says Andrew.
‘Mind-full’ is for participants who are considered ‘high functioning’. This includes people who have experienced stroke, vision impairment or are living with mental health and psychosocial disorders. Mind-full participants may partake in more complex activities and have a desire to have rich conversations.
A typical day for our ‘Mind-full’ program includes a trip to the park, where participants are armed with an A3 diary, pastels and paints and are given the opportunity to be creatively free to draw their surroundings. As participants in this stream are eager to improve their social skills, they are encouraged to interact with fellow participants.
“A key priority for our team is ensuring we create an environment that encourages participants to increase community participation, as many have been withdrawn from the community for long periods of time due to the impact their disability has had on their mental health,” Andrew says.
The ‘Life-skills’ stream is tailored to people living with intellectual disabilities, down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. The key objective for this stream, is supporting participants to learn life-long skills that support daily living independence and build enduring relationships.
Our ‘Saturday Social-skills’ stream provides an opportunity for our community to participate in fun and engaging group-based leisure and recreation activities that facilitate social skills, communication and building friendships.
While each program is tailored to different behaviours, skills, interests, NDIS goals and abilities, we understand every person is unique. Therefore, some participants partake in two to three streams of our Group Day Program. For example, a participant living with mild autism and a mental health condition may choose to partake in both ‘Mind-full’ and ‘Life-skills’ streams.
We understand how important it is for our participants to integrate into the community in their own way. This is why we thoroughly consider the interest-based recreation activities that we include in each session. As well as increasing skills, these activities help participants unwind and partake in meaningful conversations. We always allow time for interaction, and provide communication cue cards to help participants facilitate conversations with one another and support workers, independent of additional support.
Every aspect of the program is thoughtfully constructed, down to the support worker each participant is paired with.
Therapy Care's Whalan-based Group Program Centre welcomes all group program and one on one social participants.
This private space has the ability to accommodate our participant’s needs and can host an extensive roster of activities. This safe space will increase our participants’ abilities to engage, connect and learn.
The facility has a spacious indoor area and fully functioning kitchen. Our team has filled the facility with interactive games, a painting area and construction stations. This array of inviting activities provides participants with multiple opportunities to explore their creativity, learn something new, or engage in an activity they know and love. The full-functioning kitchen is the ideal space for participants to work with our Chef. Together, they prepare healthy and nutritious meals.
Outside, we have installed an interactive area, which includes a sandpit and veggie patch. Our participants are involved in caretaker duties – where they learn so much about growing produce and get a real earth to table experience.
As you may have picked up on, one of the focus areas of this space is to play out ‘from-pasture-to-plate’. Through this journey, participants gain insight into how rewarding it can be to grow produce and care for animals (particularly of the egg laying nature), and develop the confidence and skillset to cook nutritious meals in the kitchen.
The facility has plenty of parking and is close to a bus stop, a suite of local shops and multiple venues. Our day programs make use of the local community and venues for day trips.
This space is the base of many life-long learnings, meaningful friendships and memorable moments.
Our Saturday Social Skills Day Program group recently went on an expedition to Taronga Zoo.
The objective of the excursion was to expose our participants to the benefits of animal-based therapies and interventions.
Animal-based therapy has so many benefits, including decreasing stress and lowering blood pressure. Animals can serve as a source of comfort and support, reduce loneliness, and increase feelings of social support,” says Karlie.
“The main benefit of animal-therapy we focused on during our trip to the zoo, was enhancing language development. We achieved this by promoting vocabulary and concepts by adding context.
“At each exhibit participants were asked thought provoking questions about each animal, for example, where they think they might live in the wild,” says Karlie.
Integrating animal-therapy into the day program roster of activities has benefits and challenges. To ensure it, and other activities in the program continue to be beneficial, we closely observe each participant during all group outing interactions.
Therapy Care 15-year-old participant, Jenzell, has a limited vocabulary and can have difficulties expressing his needs. Jenzell is living with autism and displays behavioural outbursts and withdrawal in group settings and.
“When introduced to the animals at the zoo, Jenzell initiated a lot of appropriate physical interaction, and connected with animals on a deep level. It was great to see Jenzell so energetic and stimulated by all of his surroundings. Jenzell worked well within the group, listening to all staff directions and was ecstatic to see his favourite animal, the elephant’ says Exercise Physiologist, Jai Satorre.
