Achieving your family’s goals together

(BELINDA:) Sometimes the goals were very, very overwhelming so it was very, very hard to pick what to do first.

So our Key Worker was absolutely brilliant in actually breaking everything down for us and putting into priorities.

What will make life easier for Aidan?

What will make life easier for the family?

What should we look at first?

So, yeah, they were brilliant help in putting it into order.

(LINDA:) There’s like an assessment sheet and we came up with um…

(GRANT:) Five things.

(LINDA:) Yeah, five things that were sensible, that we could start with and we could work on each of the five things.

Then you put them, you know, how important it is to you, how satisfied are you with the way he’s performing at the moment.

And then you come back.

You work out your strategies and then you come back in a couple of months, have a look and say, ‘How did we go?’.

And that was our first one – we were able to tick, tick, tick, tick.

And we’re, like, ‘OK, we can do this’.

And move on to your next lot of you… you know.

And I think it’s about prioritizing.

(BELINDA:) It’s amazing how naturally the Key Worker makes the things and your goals become so naturally able to be incorporated into everyday life.

(GRANT:) She provides really clear observations of what she sees.

And then, again, helps us recognize that and then gives us the tools to make decisions about how we need to change things.

(DANIELLE:) We’ve been working on his speech.

We’ve also been working on where he’s… where he’s at… what else he needs, how to sleep.

When Tayeton… When we first got involved with Noah’s Ark, Tayeton didn’t sleep, hardly.

And he’d be up till… midnight most nights.

(BELINDA:) In most cases, our Key Worker, who was an occupational therapist, could handle the cases and the things that we… and our goals with Aidan.

But any time that things got too difficult, or things that she felt that she couldn’t work on, she’d call in someone else from her team.

And there was always someone else in the team that she could organize to come out.

And they would come out within, you know, a week or two and they’d come and work with Aidan for however long they were needed—might have been a week or two or a few sessions—to get on top of the problem, or the goal, that we couldn’t complete together.

(GUS,:) It still can be quite confronting for people to, you know, get given a task and then… ‘Am I doing it right? Am I…’.

‘It’s not working, it’s not working’.

But that’s where she’s got that flexibility to say, ‘Look, you know, I can give you some instructions, you know, guidelines, but you don’t have to stick by it, you know?’.

‘You’ve just gotta do what works with William’.

‘And, you know, whatever works, and then just go with it, you know’.

(LINDA:) I like how she wouldn’t ever really give us an answer.

She would help us to think of an answer.

And I think you’re a lot more capable of doing what’s required when you’ve thought of it and you’ve thought how it can work in your family and your house.

(MINGYU:) She make some picture cues for us.

So show the pictures to Veronica, like, ‘First, and next…’.

‘What we are doing and we do next’.

And then this could help a lot for some of the kids.

They are, like, familiar with picture cues.

Yeah, because for quite long of the time, Veronica doesn’t listen to us.

So every word, like, get in here and go out from there.

Nothing stay in the brain.

Yeah. But the picture, she can adopt.

(BELINDA:) I always decided what would change and what I needed to work on.

And I would sit down and I would set the goals.

The goals were up to me to set.

(MELISSA:) You do sit and structure out an overall plan of what you’d like to happen or see to happen.

And that’s sort of, I guess, assessed at every meeting because there might be new things that arise or pop up.

But I guess that’s something that you go through at the end and just see the transition in where he’s come from the beginning.

And there has been a huge change in social behavior.

(BELINDA:) There was definitely a lot of flexibility in the goals, but there was also goals that took the whole three years for us to get to the end of.

Things like being ready for school socially, things like having our speech at… to be able to speak by the time he went to school. That was a massive goal.

(MINGYU:) With Kylie’s help, she can explain what’s happening with Veronica and what kinds of help we can provide to her.

Some simple way, efficient and it works really well.