What is Sensory Integration Therapy?

Sensory Integration is how we process and respond to sensory information in everyday activities.

If you have a child or young person, their everyday activities may include school, play and activities of daily living, including feeding, dressing, and washing. Your child or young persona may find these tasks difficult due to how they process sensory information from the environment or internally, within their body, and this may affect their behaviour in many ways.

At The Retreat Clinics, we offer Sensory Integration Therapy, which is a type of Occupational Therapy, to help your child to participate successfully in the activities of everyday life. It is used to help children who have sensory processing difficulties to use all their senses together including touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing.

What do we use Sensory Integration therapy for?

We use sensory integration therapy to support children aged 5 to 17 who find everyday activities difficult due to how they process sensory information.

These challenges may include:

Difficulties with washing and dressing

Poor organisation skills

Clumsiness

Challenges riding a bike, a scooter or performing hopping and skipping

Difficulties learning to tie shoelaces or produce legible handwriting

Challenges with concentration and attention levels

Difficulties following instructions

Dislike to some textures and activities eg. Messy play

Unaware of own body temperature, hunger or pain, tiredness

Sleep difficulties

Extreme sensitivity to certain sensory experiences – sounds, smells, lights, taste, touch

Our assessments

Our assessments and Sensory Integration therapy are available at our welcoming clinic in Strensall, York, where we have a specialist sensory room which has been purposefully designed to ensure that children with sensory issues feel comfortable, safe and relaxed.

If you think your child may have sensory processing issues, we can provide assessments to determine how your child process different senses and to inform what support we can offer them going forwards.

The assessment usually consists of three stages of appointments:

1. The first appointment can either be online via video call or in person at Charles Court.

During the appointment the therapist will ask the child or family a range of questions to gather background information in relation to any diagnoses they may have, their early development, how the young person experiences their senses and what impact this has on their day-to-day life.

You will be given additional questionnaires to complete at home or to pass on to other key people/ environments such as school/ college.

2. The following appointments are usually face to face at our clinic in York and these give us an opportunity to do some movement activities so the therapist can see how the child or young person is integrating sensory information. These sessions are usually more physical, and your child will be invited into the sensory spaces we have to play and explore.

We will then discuss anything that came up when completing the questionnaires. The therapist will establish how many of these appointments are required.

3. The closing appointment can be online via video call or in person at our clinic in York and will be a feedback session where the findings of the assessments can be discussed, any questions answered and an opportunity to clarify the resources, strategies and recommendations moving forward.

A copy of the report will be sent to you in advance of this appointment.

Testimonial from our previous client

“The service we received has excelled my expectations. I found the therapist to be extremely knowledgeable and empathetic and was able to engage my daughter well. I feel the assessment was thorough and the report shared a good understanding of my daughter’s needs, providing what will be extremely useful strategies going forward. I highly recommend the service to other people whose children are presenting with sensory processing difficulties and/or autistic traits”.

Please get in touch using the form below to find out more about how we can help.