Kiara On the CTV News

Foundation Launches $50,000 Campaign to Help CK Kids Communicate

CHATHAM-KENT, ONTARIO (July 6, 2009) — We all take communicating for granted. If we need something, like a glass of water, we simply ask. If we meet a friend on the street, we say hello. If the phone rings, we answer it.

But imagine if you couldn’t verbalize your needs or wants. If you couldn’t say please or thank you, good bye or I love you. Imagine if you couldn’t speak up in school or at a restaurant or at family gatherings.

That is the reality faced by many children in our community who are not able to communicate verbally. For them, it’s a noisy world where they can’t be heard. They require caring therapists and specialized equipment to assist them with communication. Often, to access the communication tools they require, their families find themselves traveling out-of-town and enduring long wait times to satisfy their needs. They deserve better, they deserve a voice.

To support these children and teens with face-to-face and written communication needs, and to ease the burden on their families, the Children’s Treatment Centre of Chatham-Kent (CTC-CK) has embarked on an 18-month journey to become a General Level Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Clinic. Once accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care’s Assistive Devices Program (ADP), the clinic’s trained staff will work with children, along with their families and other caregivers, to enable them to participate in functional and meaningful communication on a daily basis as independently as possible.

Mentoring the CTC-CK’s team of speech language pathologists, communicative disorders assistants and occupational therapists through this accreditation process are the professional staff of the AAC Clinic at Thames Valley Children’s Centre in London. From now until April 2010, the London team will allow CTC-CK staff to observe and job shadow them, consult on clients’ needs, and assist with prescribing solutions.

Why go through all of this? Once the CTC-CK has met all the criteria set out by the ADP Peer Review Team for a General Level Clinic, children and their families in Chatham-Kent will have greater access locally to the services they require. More than 50 preschool and school age children with complex needs can initially access the caseload while numerous additional children with mild needs will benefit from the specialized resources available. Staff at the CTC-CK will be able to assess the unique needs of each child and prescribe communication or writing devices that meet them.

Augmentative communication devices assist non-verbal children in expressing themselves. They can be quite simple or quite sophisticated. Using gestures or pictures to express thoughts is augmentative communication at its most basic. Some devices allow users to hit switches or buttons to trigger pre-recorded statements or digitized speech.

Thanks to evolving electronic technology, new highly portable advanced tools are now available. These devices offer a broad array of communication options, such as software that intuitively tries to figure out what the child is communicating, clever new icons, and easy-to-access pop-ups that support more efficient, more precise communication.

As part of their clinic accreditation, the CTC-CK will need to acquire these devices for assessment purposes. However, these devices are costly. The CTC-CK has limited resources to invest in such advanced tools. That’s why the Children’s Treatment Centre Foundation of Chatham-Kent is launching “Every Child Should Be Heard”, the communications campaign, to raise $50,000 to support the establishment of the clinic and acquire the necessary equipment.

Being heard is being included. Supporting this appeal will give all children in Chatham-Kent a voice. Please help.

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