Therapy Care is launching additional streams of the in-demand Group Day Program in the wester Sydney region to ensure people with all abilities have the opportunity to build relationships, learn new skills and be a part of an inclusive community. The program now consists of three streams; ‘Life-skills’, ‘Mind-full’ and ‘Saturday Social-skills’.
Therapy Care’s Managing Director, Andrew Zorzit, explains, “The demand-led restructure of the Group Day Program gives us the opportunity to further individualise 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.”
Mind-full
“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ensuring we create an environment that encourages participants to increase community participation, as many have been withdrawn from the community for long periods of time due to the impact their disability has had on their mental health,” Andrew says.
Life-skills
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.
Saturday Social-skills
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.
To start with, the ‘Mind-full’ stream will run every Monday, Friday and every second Wednesday and will increase according to demand. ‘Life-skills’ runs five days per week and ‘Saturday Social-skills’ operates every Saturday.
To find out more about our Group Day programs, get in touch with us today by emailing us at info@therapycare.com.au or giving us a call on 02 9626 8119.
