Izzy's trip to the Bobath Centre
In May 2006, Issy and I made our 3rd trip to the Bobath Centre in London.
What is the Bobath Centre you may ask—well it is a specialist out patient centre for the treatment of children with Cerebral Palsy.
We first came across the centre—when like most parents and carers, we made the mistake of looking up everything to do with cerebral palsy when Issy was diagnosed with CP at 9 months old. We ploughed through various web sites, becoming more and more upset and despondent.
My partners sister, is a physiotherapist but unfortunately lives in Norway, but we asked her for advice—was there anything we could do to help improve her condition. She spoke to her colleagues and came back with glowing reports of the therapy services available from the Bobath Centre, so we made our first trip in April 20003 when Issy was 12 months old.
The treatment comprises attending the centre for daily sessions, for two weeks—the sessions are usually about 1 1/2 hours per day and cover physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy, depending on the needs of the child. As they only deal with the treatment of children and adults with cerebral palsy, they have the ability to very quickly grasp the needs of each individual.
Within a few days we were working on specific programmes to enable Issy to communicate - to make her needs known, improve her feeding, sitting, standing, rolling etc.
We were given a detailed programme of therapy designed to improve her development and abilities and shown how to carry these out so we can continue at home, the therapy to enable Issy to reach her potential, When we returned home, we incorporated a lot of the techniques into our normal routine and made them more into play sessions than therapy and she quickly became used to them.
We returned 12 months later to the Centre and they were pleased with her progress and worked with us to develop these improvements even more.
I am pleased to say that at this visit, the Bobath Centre thought she had made real significant improvements and is now able to sign and vocalise noises and use a communication book, to make her needs known and make choices. She requires only minimal support when sitting on a bench—standing and walking now only requires moderate support and the fact that she is now 3ft 8 and weighs 3 stone—shows that her feeding skills have greatly improved.
We still have a long way to go and have a new set of techniques to work with Issy to increase her stability and patterns of movement, improve hand function and development of independent play activates/self care and communication but we are getting there.
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