Question
What are developmental considerations for activities of daily living in children and adolescents with spina bifida?
Answer
This has been an area we've been looking at recently. In the clinic setting especially, we don't have too much time with our families because of all the providers that they see; so we've been looking for a quick screen for executive functioning that might help us be attuned to some of their issues. For those who come here for therapy, where we have more time, we work closely with our speech language pathologists who perform an executive function and cognition battery. So that's been helpful in identifying some of the areas; and helping our clients have more awareness of some of their challenges so that they know what kinds of strategies they can employ when they're working on those tasks.
Debbie did just participate in a camp that coincidentally, we had last week, and we've run different types of spina bifida camps over the last several years. In the past, the ones that I was involved in focused on activity and sports, as well as integration into the community; this recent camp focused more on transition. The camp was four days. It had three participants this year, and it was focused on a lot of the transition skills that we talked about. I think it was beneficial in helping the children with planning and executing a lot of those tasks. They went into the community, visited different colleges to talk about their accommodations. They planned and made all their meals, and they talked to different providers here as well. It was a great experience. We're hoping to expand it to more camps, and possibly to a weekly group format because they gained a lot of information and skills from that.
