Outpatient physical rehabilitation

If your child has had trouble with motor skills as a baby, is recovering from a sports injury or has recently been released from the hospital, our pediatric physical therapists can help. Physical therapy helps your child regain strength and mobility after an illness, injury or a developmental delay. Physical therapy can also help prevent permanent damage and recurring problems with treatments, such as splinting, casting or bracing.

Physical therapy uses adaptive equipment evaluation and management, among many other techniques, to help your child focus on:

Occupational therapists help children develop skills for everyday living. These skills include hand-eye coordination, visual-motor skills, eating, dressing and writing. We also use upper extremity strength and coordination tasks to improve functional activity.

Occupational therapy helps your child work on:

Our pediatric speech therapists are trained to help your child develop pre-language skills and improve language comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation of words. They also help your child if they have difficulty eating or swallowing.

Our pediatric specialists are certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The team treats children with disorders related to articulation, language, fluency, voice, oral-motor function, feeding, central hearing and breathing.

Speech therapy focuses on:

• Articulation
• Assistive technology
• Augmentative communication
• Feeding mechanics
• Fluency
• Oral motor skills
• Pragmatic language and social skills
• Receptive and expressive language skills
• Stuttering
• Swallowing mechanics
• Voice quality

The goal of pediatric speech therapy is to help your child communicate functionally in their everyday environment. This can be achieved through a variety of speech therapy approaches, including:

• Articulation therapy — This therapy focuses on providing speech-sound stimulation for the correct production of sounds.
• Fluency therapy — This therapy treats stuttering and implements techniques to encourage smooth, easy speech.
• Language therapy — This therapy facilitates the development of receptive or expressive language skills to increase comprehension and verbal expression.
• Oral-motor, feeding and respiration therapy — These therapies teach breathing skills and adequate function of the oral anatomy for communication, feeding and swallowing.
• Voice therapy — This therapy is used to determine and maintain appropriate pitch, nasality, volume and voice quality.

Alternative communication

Sometimes, children use other forms of communication to promote speech development. This is called augmentative or alternative communication (ACC) and may include using pictures, a talking computer or sign language to communicate. This can be especially helpful if your child has cerebral palsy, communication impairments, head injuries, autism or spinal cord injuries.

Our pediatric therapeutic feeding team consists of licensed speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists who specialize in the assessment and treatment of feeding, swallowing and oral-motor problems. Our team works in partnership with primary care physicians, nurses, gastroenterologists, nutritionists and educational providers to create a care plan for your child.

Feeding difficulties are often related to conditions such as:

• Cerebral palsy
• Cleft palate
• Feeding aversion
• Prematurity
• Sensory issues
• Stomach disorders

Our team assesses your child's condition by observing feeding sessions and using specialized studies to take all aspects of swallowing into account. To treat a feeding disorder, the team may:

• Assist in the positioning and seating for feeding
• Educate you about appropriate nutrition for your child
• Help you transition your child to more advanced feeding, such as weaning from baby foods to table foods or advancing from a bottle to a cup
• Select equipment to enhance your child's feeding abilities