The Specialist Autism Team (SAT) is a multi-disciplinary team who work together to provide autistic people aged over 14 years with the specialist support they may need. In order to access support from the SAT, speak to your GP or other health professional involved in your care, such as a mental health nurse.
The Specialist Autism Team (SAT) consist of:
- Nurses and Health Care support workers
- Occupational Therapists and Assistant (OT)
- Speech and Language Therapists and Assistant (SaLT)
- Psychologist and Psychology assistant.
- Dietitian
- Family Therapist
The nursing team
The nursing team can:
- Provide assessment and interventions to autistic young people/adults who display behaviours that may be challenging or causing risk of harm to themselves or others. These behaviours may also be impacting on their ability to access services such as employment or education
- Support you, your family/carers, education and employers to understand your autism
- Provide training to other services about understanding autism and how to support autistic people
- Support with making adjustments to help you access other services
The Occupational Therapy (OT) team
The Occupational Therapy team support you to build on your strengths, performance skills and motivation, and enable you to carry out everyday tasks that matter to them.
Occupational Therapists believe that participating in meaningful occupations is directly linked to positive physical and mental health. These tasks may include:
- Self-care activities
- School/work – being productive or staying in education/work
- Social/leisure activities
- Participating in hobbies and interests
- Sensory assessment
Speech and Language Therapy (SaLT) team
The Speech and Language Therapy team support autistic adults, young people and the important people in their lives to…
- Have a better understanding of conversations
- Improve communication between autistic people and friends, family, or others
- Ensure information is given in a way that matches the communication of the person
- Share thoughts, ideas, and feelings with each other
- Strengthen your communication skills to use body language or recognise social clues in others
- Make friends and feel more confident in social situations
- Recognise all the ways anxiety is communicated by the person
- Explore whether communication is going well and how it could be better
Psychology team
The psychologist provides a specialist service to autistic young people and adults, their families and carers. The role involves:
- Conducting specialist psychological assessments and using this information to identify strengths and weaknesses in areas such as memory, self-management, emotional recognition, forming and maintaining relationships
- Developing autism profiles
- Supporting other services on recommendations for making adjustments to deliver psychological treatment
Dietician
Autistic people can often have eating difficulties and the dietician can offer support and advice to overcome these difficulties and help to meet nutritional needs to keep well.
Examples of how the dietician can help include:
- Help to balance eating when eating a very limited number of foods
- Check if you are getting enough energy and protein in your diet and if not, offer practical ways to change this
- Support individuals who may have sensory issues which affect food choices and how they eat
- Offer advice regarding the vitamins and minerals needed to stay healthy
- Advise on easy ways to increase the amount of fluids you are drinking if you’re not drinking enough
Family Therapy
Family therapists recognise that when someone in a family has a difficulty, it affects everyone else in the family too.
Family therapy is not about blaming families for problems. It is not about insisting that a family does things how the therapist says they should.
Family therapists:
- Build on the family’s strengths, knowledge and insights to work together towards a shared, preferred outcome
- Help those in close relationships to better understand and support one another, offering a space for family members to explore difficult thoughts and emotions safely and to look at things from each other’s perspectives
- Explore how a diagnosis has shaped family relationships, impacted on who does what, for whom and how the person with autism interacts with the wider community, health resources, work or education
- Support families to think through the dilemmas that often come up, particularly at points of transition or change
ChatAutism
ChatAutism is text messaging service for autistic people aged 14+, and parents and carers of autistic people aged 14+ living in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. Messages will be read and responded to between the hours of 09:00 and 17:00, Monday to Friday.
The ChatAutism service enables autistic people and their parents/carers to get confidential health advice and support on a range of issues including:
- Emotional Wellbeing
- Healthy lifestyle (sleep, diet etc)
- Drugs, smoking, alcohol
- Healthy relationships
- Finding support
- Understanding your autism
Send a text to: 07312 277097
