On our courses, we teach staff from CAMHS and adult/older adult mental health services how to use Ayres’ Sensory Integration to inform care including for those who have had early trauma.
On our in-house courses, we regularly teach mixed staff teams including Mental Health Nurses and Healthcare Assistants, CPN’s, OT’s, PT’s, SLT’s and Therapy Support Staff, Complementary Therapists, Psychologists and Psychiatrists. Working with staff teams from forensic, secure, acute and longer stay units, our lecturers help teams to develop and implement sensory informed care pathways. This includes working with sensory providers to develop secure safe sensory rooms for safe self-regulation and sensory-rich movement activities suitable for secure and forensic environments, where ligature risks mean traditional swings and other equipment cannot be used.
The use of Ayres’ Sensory Integration to support health and well-being has grown across the UK and Ireland.
The research and evidence base is expanding across the globe, with more clinical audits and studies being published that report that Ayres’ Sensory Integration is
- improving self-awareness
- improving self-regulation
- promoting participation in everyday life
- increasing clients ability to engage with others, with therapy
this means that there are significant reductions in
- days in secure or acute care
- deliberate self-harm
- the use of PRN medication
- the need for the use of physical support aka TMAV
We’d like to thank Tina Champagne for pointing us in the direction of this resource which fits so neatly alongside the resources and tools we teach on our courses.
Tina is a colleague and critical friend of ASI WISE – having started her journey into sensory integration in parallel to our journey here in the UK where we were focussing on improving participation in care and daily life, addressing development of skills and occupations including self care to reduce self harm and use of PRN medication. We finally met in 2004 at a first conference about ASI in MH in Cornwall, UK.
Her work in addressing the use of chemical (mace) and mechanical (cuffs) restraints in the US helped transform their mental health care and she wrote several chapters in this free online resource about developmental trauma and practical ways to institute trauma-informed care.
Resources for Eliminating Control and Restraint aka Therapeutic Manage of Aggression and Violence
https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2016/07/vq/restraint-resources.pdf
