Our Services

Initial Feeding Assessment

Our initial feeding assessment is first conducted by our experienced dietitian and founder of OFC, Nadia Fathinia. Nadia is highly skilled at taking a detailed assessment of your child’s feeding challenges which includes:

  • Medical history, including birth history, medications and supplements

  • A thorough dietary assessment, including feeding history

  • Understanding what mealtime routines look like

  • Sensory screening

  • Oral-motor and swallow screening

  • Anthropometry analysis (height and weight)

  • Current medical and allied health team

From there, Nadia will determine next steps. Your child may need a separate or joint assessment between our occupational therapist and speech pathologist.

Every child will require all three disciplines (OT, SP, dietetics) on board for the final stage of the assessment, which is arguably the most important - a collaboration meeting to discuss the causes of your child’s feeding issues and determine next best steps for either further testing/assessments and/or treatment options.

Why so many steps? Because not every child needs all three disciplines in the room for a feeding assessment straight away. This helps tailor our whole assessment process to suit your child.

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Our weekly feeding therapy uses an SOS (Sequential Oral-Sensory) informed approach to manage your child’s feeding issues. During the 1 hour you can expect your child to be well regulated and learn about different textures, sights, sounds and other sensory elements of food that are and aren’t included in their current diet. Our clinicians love to have parents in the room (so you can learn too!) but we also accomodate parents who sit in the waiting room, go run errands, catch up on emails or just have some personal time.

These sessions take 1-1.5 hours which includes the therapist preparing all of the food items and equipments they will use during their session with you and your child, time to allow for regulation and approximately 45-60 minutes in session. Your therapist may vary these times if they feel your child needs more or less time doing a certain part of that therapy routine

We conduct therapy in 10 session blocks - how many blocks your child needs will depend on their needs, but we generally find most children and parents will need about 2-3 blocks on average. Once a child can successfully put a new food in their mouth, chew and swallow, and parents feel confident to continue therapeutic support at home, is when a child will no longer need feeding therapy.

Regular Feeding Therapy

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Dietetic Consults

Our dietitians, Nadia and Claire, are well versed in ensuring your child gets adequate nutrition in while managing their feeding issues. Many children with limited diets have nutrient deficiencies, and often are over-supplemented, leading to either further deficiencies or toxicity. Our dietitians will help you navigate balancing your child’s macronutrients and micronutrients while also providing realistic strategies to improve baseline nutrition. Common issues our dietitians see and help manage in children with feeding difficulties include, but are not limited to:

  • Iron deficiency

  • B12 deficiency

  • Vitamin A deficiency

  • Inadequate protein intake

  • Excessive carbohydrate and salt intake

  • Faecal loading and constipation

When you book a consult with our dietitians you can expect a thorough assessment and a tailored plan to meet your child’s nutrition needs. A breakdown of prices are below:

Initial assessment - 1 hour

Review assessment - 20-30 minutes

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Contact us.

orangefeedingclinic@gmail.com
63629806

86 Peisley Street
Orange, NSW, 2800