LD Touch Therapy

What is Touch Therapy?

We all communicate through touch – we have ‘touch conversations’.  It is another language where our touch is our own personal signature through which we can also communicate emotions. Touch Therapy uses touch to try to connect and communicate with someone.

This is particularly important when a person does not use words to communicate, whose behaviour is concerning and who may also experience mental health difficulties. Looking at the quality of supporters’ touch is also important as many people who need support, have no choice but to receive touch when, for example, requiring personal and intimate care. 

 

 

Who is Touch Therapy for?

• Where a person’s anxiety, mental ill-health, emotional state can lead to behaviour of concern, including self-injurious behaviour, particularly where there is a risk of places where they live or work, breaking down;
• Where Touch Therapy may contribute to the prevention of admission to institutions, so that a person can continue to use community services;
• Where behaviour of concern may be a reaction to a particular event, for example bereavement, loss, experience of abuse and trauma;
• Where a person seems to find it difficult to receive touch or to connect and communicate or be understood and, therefore, to form relationships. This includes where a person finds touch difficult in specific situations such as personal care, medical interventions;
• Where the touch element of a person’s sensory processing could be further explored;
• Where a person’s perception or awareness of their own body is negative; they do not feel valued or where our difficult experiences cause us to ‘forget’ our bodies;
• Where a person requires support at the end of their life.

 

 

What is the aim of the service?

• To explore a different way of connecting where this seems difficult for both the individual and their supporters.
• To support the improvement of a meaningful relationship between the care receiver and their care givers.
• To offer space to explore touch as a means of communication – this includes inviting touch to become a reciprocal ‘touch conversation’. Interactive touch enables us to work and communicate together, for example, when someone uses their own touch to hit, scratch, poke their own body – the therapist may ask to be involved in this movement and action in order to support a reduction in its impact and importantly to convey that they are being listened to. The therapist will use the person’s own rhythm of touch to invite connection.
• To actively listen through touch and convey that ‘we are trying to listen even though we may not understand’.
• To support a person to recognise their own body and explore valuing it.
• Through Somatic Trauma Therapy, offer support to explore how our body expresses past/current trauma (however trauma is defined); and if possible, use our body to help us change this expression. Somatic means ‘relating to the body’. It is important to explore this when a person cannot access a talking therapy.
• To enable someone to experience some ‘rest time’ from continual activity, or high stress arousal; to enable our ‘fight and flight’ expression to return to a more balanced state.
• To create space for someone to ‘just be’ who they are – no attempt to change this – invariably in this space change does however reveal itself.  Very, very occasionally, this has had an impact on medication reduction.
• To support the plans put in place (such as Positive Behaviour Support plans), to help someone through the stages of communicating through behaviour of concern.
• To ‘be with’ someone at the end of their life, and support carers to do so through their touch.

 

 

Referrals

Eligibility criteria:

• Aged 19 years and over (or within 6 weeks of their 19th birthday).
• Diagnosed learning disability and needs specialist health support that cannot be met through mainstream services even with the use of reasonable adjustments.
• Registered with a Birmingham GP.
• Moving into the Birmingham area with a Birmingham residential postcode and an identified Birmingham GP, but are unable to register with the GP until they have moved into their property (for example, a service user discharged from hospital or a complex case moving into the area and going through the transfer or handover of care process). Confirmation will be required for service users eligible for s117 that the transferring Learning Disability Service have had a conversation with the local Integrated Care Board (ICB).

 

A referral to the service can be made through a number of means including a patient’s GP, carer, or family member.

 

You can make a referral by calling the Learning Disability’s Single Point of Access:

• Phone: 0121 466 4980
• Email:  BCHNT.ldreferrals@nhs.net.

 

This will require completion of a referral form that needs to be sent through.