Sensation Station is humbled by and excited about winning the award for the Best Initiative for Inclusion & Wellbeing at the GESS Awards 2020.
Here’s the submission that brought this about!
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Describe the background to and context of your initiative:
Sensation Station is founded and established by a mother who wanted to create a safe, secure, fun and stimulating centre for her own child’s needs within Dubai; a centre that would cater to all types of developmental needs.
It is headed by our Managing Director, who fully understands the struggles and rewards of not only being diagnosed with ADHD herself since childhood, but has also successfully raised her son who is a person of determination, diagnosed with Autism.
Detail the nature of your work. Spell out your objectives and achievements to date:
Our objective as a centre is to reach out to as many families who have children in need of Speech & Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Early Intervention services. We aim to make this as accessible as possible by utilising our fully-equipped centre (open six days a week), providing out-reach services to schools and providing training and support for the community of parents and professionals. This is all done collaboratively with parents, educational facilities and other key professionals.
We arrange opportunities for parents and professionals to engage in learning, support and continued professional development.
By working closely with schools, we enable teaching staff to become better equipped in identifying difficulties children may be experiencing, in turn this supports schools to develop a more inclusive environment for learning and education.
We provide regular and ongoing free training to teachers and teaching assistants at our outreach schools, which helps strengthen our personal objectives of having inclusive accessible education to people of all abilities. The training sessions are tailored to each schools need, and helps teachers recognise and work with children of determination within their classroom setting and implement strategies successfully.
Parents play a valuable role in the services we provide and that’s the reason we regularly deliver important information through our coffee mornings and parent talks, which are regularly held at our centre, as well as at schools and nurseries. By giving parents knowledge, we help them make informed choices about their child’s care as well as give them the confidence to facilitate their child’s progression. As a people-centred service, our whole aim is to create an environment where parents, staff and children can feel empowered to create a more sustainable and realistic environment that will lead to independence.
How does your contribution differ from standard practice?:
Sensation Station does differ significantly in many ways from similar services, as I’m sure you have already noticed from the above information, but the biggest way we differentiate ourselves is our ethics, principles and objectives.
Sensation Station have a fund provided directly from the owners for parents who are on low incomes and may be facing financial difficulties. Disability does not discriminate between rich or poor. This means that families that are not privileged to have sufficient funds may find themselves in a position where they are unable to access quality therapy services for their child. The fund was set up for the sole purpose of ensuring we provide a non-discriminatory service to families that may otherwise not be able to access our centre.
We are transparent in our pricing as a private therapy centre and openly display our competitive therapy session fees directly on our website.
We only book consultations and assessments if we have availability to follow through with immediately available sessions. This is because we believe in early intervention and don’t like to place children on long waiting lists to receive therapy. Should we not have availability, we provide a list of other licensed therapy centres to allow parents to research other options without delay.
We never ask parents or schools to lock into an agreement, where we ask for exclusive rights to their children or their facility, as it’s important that parents are given the choice to decide which facility is the best fit for their child.
We never ever take commission from, or pay commission to schools, because we feel this is unethical practice. Our likeminded outreach partners refer to us based on our high level of expertise and experience, not for financial gain. Our staff are not paid on any commission basis, so will have no incentive to take a child on, or prolong therapy due to meeting a quota.
We feel our families are already feeling extreme emotional and financial pressures and we refuse to engage in transactions that don’t have their best interests at heart.
We can truly state that we are 100% ethical in our work when enabling children of determination and only charge fair fees with the objective of ensuring a sustainable and quality service that will inevitably benefit our clients.
We treat our staff with the utmost respect and support; this is reflected in our extremely low staff turnover rates. Therapy staff at Sensation Station receive monthly one to one supervision, attend weekly team meetings, are allocated time for preparation and administrative tasks on a daily basis, and have the opportunity to attend training and much more! All of these elements allow our team to provide a high quality, highly skilled and happy services. In addition to this we organise frequent team building events and give regular staff recognition awards. In short, we recognise that if we have content staff that feel supported, this will in turn reflect in the outcomes of the services they provide.
How did you make a change? – describe how you put the initiative in action:
We made a change by being at the forefront of continuous professional development and bringing international experts to the region to provide training for therapists, teachers, schools and parents. By sharing our vision of what inclusion really means in education and the community, in turn we have been able to influence positive change.
We have been able to change external mindsets to encourage more ethical business decisions, in a culture of children’s services that are mainly operating as private profit-making companies. By sharing our strategies with senior management teams in other children’s services we have been able to encourage the achievement of the joint goal of inclusive education.
We are proud to say we now work with a number of education providers that limit the additional financial impact for parents when placing their child of determination into a mainstream setting where the parents are treated equally ‘One child – One fee’.
These schools now, with the advice and support from us regarding financial planning, have been able to include therapy as a department, and offer the resources and equipment needed to work effectively with children of determination (much like, sports, music or any other department). Parents of children who will access these resources, will pay the same school fees as any other child in the school. It is our belief at Sensation Station that this is true inclusive education and we will continue to move forward to achieve this goal and to eradicate discrimination, encourage fairness and to achieve this in line with the Government of Dubai’s “My community” and ’A city for all’ vision to transform Dubai into a disability-friendly city by 2020- 21.
If relevant, how does this work fit within your institution’s overall corporate social responsibility strategy?:
Our corporate social responsibility is integrated within our company strategy and objectives. We support in terms of having a fund which parents may apply to, as well as offering free training opportunities to help children in all environments. We work within our local schools and communities to offer training to teachers and therapists across Dubai. We work with universities to provide high quality, documented work experience/ internship opportunities to students.
We do this to encourage and promote high standards of practice to future generations of graduates perusing a career in similar services.
Summary:
Sensation Station differs significantly from similar services, key factors being our ethics, principles and objectives.
To elaborate further:
- Funding: This is provided directly from the owner for parents who are on low incomes and may be facing financial difficulties. The fund was set up for the sole purpose of ensuring we provide a non-discriminatory, quality service to families that may otherwise not be able to access our centre.
- Transparency: As a private therapy centre, we display our competitive therapy session fees on our website. Consultations and assessments are booked only if we have availability to follow through with immediately available sessions. We believe in early intervention and don’t like to place children on waiting lists to receive therapy. If we do not have availability, we provide a list of other licensed therapy centres allowing parents to research other options without delay.
- Non-Exclusive Contracts: We never ask parents/schools to lock into an agreement, asking for exclusive rights to their children or their facility, parents are given the choice to decide what is best for their child.
- No Commission: We never ever take/pay commission to schools as we feel this is unethical practice that is effectively at the cost of parents. Our outreach partners refer to us based on our high level of expertise and experience, not financial gain. Understanding our families are already feeling extreme emotional and financial pressures, we refuse to engage in transactions that don’t have their best interests at heart. We can truly state that we are 100% ethical in our work to help children of determination and only charge fair fees with the objective of ensuring a sustainable and quality service that will inevitably benefit our clients.
- Happy Staff: We treat our staff with the utmost respect and support; hence our extremely low staff turnover rates. Therapy staff at our centre receive monthly one to one supervision, attend weekly team meetings, are allocated time for preparation and administrative tasks on a daily basis, and have the opportunity to attend training/ CPD opportunities at the cost of the centre. We recognise that if we have content staff that feel supported, this will in turn reflect in the outcomes of the services they provide.
- CPD & Training: Sensation Station made a change by being at the forefront of continuous professional development. Bringing international experts to the region providing training for therapists, teachers and parents. By sharing our vision of what inclusion really means in education and the community, we have been able to influence positive change.
- Ethics and Inclusion: Succeeding in changing external mindsets to encourage more ethical business decisions, by sharing our strategies with senior management teams, in other children’s services, resulting in a joint goal of inclusive education. We are proud to say we work with a number of education providers that limit the additional financial impact for parents when placing their child of determination into a mainstream setting. These schools, with advice and support from us regarding financial planning, have been able to include therapy as a department, offering resources/equipment needed to work effectively with children of determination. Children will access these resources & pay the same school fees as other children in the school. It is our belief that this is true inclusive education. We continue to move forward to achieve this goal and to eradicate discrimination, encourage fairness in line with Government strategies.
- Environment: Sensation Station have many plans in place to achieve a better environment for our children’s futures. We have now become about 85% paperless and have plans in place to achieve 98% Paperless before the end of 2020. We love to recycle and have our recyclable items collected as part of a recycling scheme in Dubai.
- CSR: Our corporate social responsibility is integrated within our strategy & objectives. Providing support in terms of having a fund which parents may apply to, offering free training opportunities to help children in all environments. We work within our local schools and communities to offer training to teachers & therapists.
- Future Professionals: Our vision extends as we collaborate with universities to provide high quality, valuable work experience opportunities to students.