Happy Kids Clinic

OIC’s Social Enterprise

November 2017We have now been running our social enterprise for over a year and have a staff consisting of 2.4 speech therapists, an occupational therapist, and two Khmer therapy assistants. We are also started doing some work with a psychologist to begin working on an autism diagnosis model.The clinic has mostly been working in an individual treatment model in clinic, home or school settings, but in recent times we have branched into therapy groups. During the school holidays, the team ran a very successful feeding (see feeding group set up in photo above) and communication group. Parental involvement was like nothing we’ve seen here before, as well as the amazing social opportunities for the children, who have maybe never had a friend before. It has also fostered great team work and an appreciation of everyone’s roles and knowledge. This has inspired us to continue the group model, as well as beginning pair therapy.Working in a cross cultural setting has its challenges. The majority of our clients are Khmer, with many of our children speaking two or more languages. The support of our Khmer therapy assistants is invaluable with these clients and we often need to be very creative when families request that we run therapy in two languages. It definitely helps to improve our therapists’ Khmer skills!We are also stepping more into school training, and again, trying to challenge the status quo a little by doing more than isolated workshops and trying to get into classrooms to help teachers and teacher assistants with actually implementing strategies.Now that school is back, the HKC team are getting really busy and making new relationships with schools and families.