Did you know DCP has a Therapeutic Carer Support Team, featuring allied health professionals including social workers, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, psychologists, physiotherapists and developmental educators? We caught up with Lead Clinician Yanna Tsouvallas to learn more about what the team offers.

What does the team do?

We’re a multidisciplinary team of allied health professionals, and we meet with carers in their homes and support them to build a developmental picture of the children they’re caring for. We help make sense of a child’s early lived experiences and additional needs, piecing together what might be happening, talking about the behaviour they’re seeing, where this might come from and exploring what might be helpful. We provide carers with a safe space to share and problem solve. Children in care can often have uneven development. For example, they might have great skills in some areas, like practical skills, but need some help with regulating their emotions. As things come up, we might consult with, and lean into, the wisdom of our colleagues, like our occupational therapist or one of our clinical psychologists or speech therapists.

What makes this support so important?

Our carers are like gold and we need to invest in them and help them to feel heard, understood and valued. Their relationship with the child is vital as it can shape their development and build a strong foundation for children to heal and learn. For a child to grow up in a healthy place, we need to work with our carers to build their courage, strength and resilience.

What are the rewarding parts of your role?

Seeing the growth in that relationship between the carer and the child. I’ve also loved seeing children be confident to seek out affection when they’ve struggled with that before, and those ‘a-ha’ moments when a carer talks about how their child responded in a positive way to something, when previously, they might have struggled with it. One example is seeing a child having success at school, after being afraid to go to school and have that separation with the carer.

Tell us about your therapeutic social stories.

We create these personalised stories around certain needs that arise, to help children talk about tricky issues such as coping with school transition, loss, or separation around access. It’s an opportunity for a carer to listen to them and tell them they’re not alone. They’re really powerful.

FAST FACTS

• The Therapeutic Carer Support Team supports about 300 children and their carers
• Four extra staff were added to the team this year, following additional State Government funding
• Carers can speak to their child’s case worker or their own kinship support worker if they’d like to be referred to the team for support.

This story is part of DCP's newsletter for foster and kinship carers, Caring Together. Flip through the latest newsletter, and past editions, here.