Our two day workshop is a “great opportunity to reflect on clinical practice and learn new skills”. Find out more about the application of Ayres’ Sensory Integration beyond childhood to support health and wellbeing.
We can also offer 2 or 3 day onsite bespoke training and consultation for your organisation to support the development of sensory integration informed care pathways.
Just like a parent can decide a child has a cold and needs Calpol, a sensory rich home environment can help support development. However just like a child may need a Dr, Dentist or other specialist if they have a more serious illness, what some people need is specialist intervention.
Sensory Integration therapy requires years of training, first just to become a therapist and then the advanced training needed to accurately assess, develop a personalised intervention plan and then carry out the intervention. We might all know when tonsils need removing, but few of us would do it at home. Telling someone about how tonsils get removed or how sensory integration happens is very different to actually doing it, and doing it safely and so that the outcome is as expected. Sensory integration therapy is not just about swinging on a swing or bouncing on a ball – it is about so much more. And is definitely not about just about wearing headphones and having a bouncy cushion.
The superb article from AOTA’s CHOOSING WISELY programme – see link below – got me thinking. I get weekly emails from people offering to treat other people’s children without training, offering Sensory Profile assessments by mail from a questionnaire when they are not even a therapist.
Share this blog and have interesting discussions with clients, colleagues and line managers. As relevant here in UK and Ireland as in US. This really confirms what we teach in our modules and promote as an organisation; including the best standardised norm referenced tool currently at our disposal – the SIPT. No or limited assessment waters down efficacy. Standardised assessment (when possible) structured clinical observations and thorough clinical reasoning using a clear process are imperative. Data driven decision making.
https://www.aota.org/AboutAOTA/Membership/Tools/Periodicals/choosing-wisely-sensory.aspx
Therapists across the globe are collaborating, giving of their time and energy to develop a new assessment tool to comprehensively assess sensory integration difficulties.
This is the final call for therapists wishing to join the team for the UK and Ireland EASI ( Evaluation of Ayres’ Sensory Integration) normative data collection project. You can read more about this global initiative, Goal 2 of the ASI 2020 Vision here.
See more about the EASI – click on the image below or this link: powerpoint slides from Dr Suzanne Smith Roley.
Introduction to the Evaluation in Ayres Sensory Integration® (EASI).
Mailloux Z1, Parham LD2, Roley SS3, Ruzzano L4, Schaaf RC5.
AbstractComprehensive, reliable, and valid assessment is essential for individually tailored, appropriate, and effective intervention planning and implementation. Research, education, and practice using an Ayres Sensory Integration® (ASI) approach have a long history of prioritizing comprehensive assessment. To meet the need for a set of tests that will fully evaluate the constructs of ASI with psychometrically strong, internationally appropriate, and easily accessible measurement tools, the development of the Evaluation in Ayres Sensory Integration®(EASI) has been initiated. This article introduces the EASI, describes the overarching plan for its development, and reports the results of promising preliminary analyses of discriminative validity data.
What more do we need to show how mainstream sensory integration theory is becoming than this recent publication in Neuroscience News. It is just a pity it says we need new therapies when we have a good one that has gold standard randomised control trials showings its effectiveness in the ASD population. 
![ASI Wise & Sensory Project [Ayres Sensory Integration Education across Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England]](https://i0.wp.com/sensoryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cropped-Asi-wise_logo-01-1.jpg?fit=2362%2C2286&ssl=1){kind=logo}
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