F.A.Q.

Absolutely. At Functional Focus, we strive to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for all individuals, including those in the LGBTQIA2+ community. Your identity, experiences, and needs are respected, and therapy is provided with kindness, understanding, and without judgment.

We are committed to ensuring that every client feels safe, supported, and valued throughout their therapy journey. If you have any concerns or specific preferences, please don't hesitate to share them with us so we can tailor the approach to best suit you.

Currently, Functional Focus does not offer direct billing, but we hope to provide more payment options in the near future. For now, we accept the following forms of payment:

• Credit Card
• E-transfer
• Cheques

If you have any questions about payment or need assistance, feel free to reach out!

In-person services:
For your convenience and comfort, we offer in-person sessions at your home or another community location within 30 minutes of downtown Halifax. We believe in meeting clients where their needs are, whether that's in the community, at home, school, work, the pool, or other environments that support your therapy goals. For locations beyond this area, additional mileage charges may apply.

Virtual services:
We also provide virtual care through a secure platform for clients across Nova Scotia. If you're unable to meet in person, we can work together remotely to achieve your therapy goals.

Sessions are typically 60 minutes in length (50 minutes of direct client care and 10 minutes for administrative tasks). The frequency of sessions depends on your personalized care plan and the goals we're working toward. We can adjust the schedule as needed to ensure the best progress and results for you.

Your first occupational therapy visit will be an opportunity for us to get to know each other and understand your unique needs and goals. Here's what you can expect:

Friendly introduction: We'll start with a relaxed conversation where we learn more about you (or your child) and the challenges you're facing. This is also a time for you to ask any questions and share any specific concerns or goals.

Comprehensive assessment: Depending on the individual, the first visit may include an assessment. For children, this could involve playful activities to observe fine motor skills, sensory preferences, and social interactions. For adults, we'll discuss your daily routines and any areas where you need support, such as work, home tasks, or managing physical or cognitive challenges.

Personalized plan: Based on the information gathered, we will create a tailored therapy plan. This may include setting specific goals to work on, such as improving fine motor skills, managing sensory overload, or developing strategies for daily tasks.

Collaboration: We'll discuss the next steps and how we can best work together to achieve your goals. Therapy will be a collaborative process where we provide guidance, and you (or your child) take an active role in making progress.

We aim to make your first visit as comfortable and informative as possible. It's the start of a journey towards increased independence and confidence!

Absolutely! We encourage parents and caregivers to be actively involved in therapy sessions. Your participation is vital, especially for children, as it helps reinforce the strategies and skills we work on during therapy. For children, caregivers can be present to support learning, ask questions, and receive guidance on how to continue helping at home.

For adults, we are happy to include family members or caregivers in sessions when it's helpful for understanding strategies, supporting goal achievement, and ensuring consistent progress.

If you'd like to attend a session or have specific concerns you'd like to discuss, just let us know. Together, we can create the best plan for success!

Yes! We believe in the importance of consistency and practice between sessions. For both children and adults, we provide personalized home programs or strategies to help reinforce the skills we work on during therapy. These may include activities, exercises, or specific tips to try at home, school, work, or in the community.

We will work with you to ensure the strategies are practical, achievable, and fit into your daily routines. Whether it's simple exercises for fine motor skills, sensory regulation techniques, or time management tools, we will make sure you have the support you need to continue making progress outside of our sessions.

Occupational therapy (OT) helps individuals of all ages develop, recover, or maintain the skills needed for daily activities. These may include tasks like dressing, cooking, handwriting, social interactions, or managing sensory sensitivities. The goal is to help individuals lead more independent, functional, and fulfilling lives.

Both children and adults can benefit from occupational therapy. Children who struggle with fine motor skills, sensory processing, or daily routines can improve their abilities through OT. Adults recovering from injury, illness, or managing chronic conditions like pain or ADHD also benefit from OT to regain independence in daily activities.

If your child has difficulty with tasks like holding a pencil, tying shoes, handling sensory input (textures, sounds, etc.), or managing daily routines, OT may be helpful. We can work together to assess their needs and create a plan to build the necessary skills.

Therapy sessions typically involve an assessment of your or your child's needs, followed by activities or exercises that target specific goals. For children, this might include play-based activities to improve motor skills or sensory processing. For adults, sessions might focus on real-life tasks like organizing, managing time, or improving work-related skills.

It depends entirely on the goals we set together, but the most common are greater independence in daily tasks, better fine and gross motor skills, workable sensory strategies, improved attention and regulation, and more confidence. We set measurable goals at the start so progress is something you can see rather than something you have to take on trust.

Applied Behaviour Analysis is the study of why behaviour happens and what changes it. In practice, a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA) works out what a behaviour is achieving for someone — attention, escape, access to something, or a sensory need — and then teaches an easier, safer way to achieve the same thing, while changing the conditions that make the behaviour necessary in the first place.

Children and adults. Most commonly autistic children and children with developmental disabilities, but also adults with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injury or dual diagnoses. Our BCBA has supported individuals from age three to over sixty.

Yes, and we mean something specific by that. Goals come from the person and their family, not from a checklist of typical behaviour. Assent matters — a person showing they want to stop is heard, however they show it. We do not target stimming, we do not use eye contact as a goal, and we never withhold food, drink, comfort or communication in order to obtain compliance. There is a fuller account on our neurodiversity-affirming therapy page.

Where the behaviour happens — home, school, daycare, day programs and the community, plus virtual sessions for coaching and planning. Behaviour that only improves in a clinic room has not really improved.

Yes. School and daycare consultation is one of our most requested services — classroom-ready plans and staff coaching so a child is supported consistently by everyone around them. See also supports at daycare.

Typically: fewer and shorter incidents, a real communication route replacing behaviour that was doing the communicating, more independence in daily living skills, and — very often the most valued one — a household that is less exhausted, because everyone is running the same plan.

Not yet. Speech-language pathology is joining the practice and we are recruiting for it — the speech therapy page has a waitlist, and everyone on it is contacted before bookings open publicly. We would rather tell you that plainly than take a booking we cannot honour. If you are an SLP, we would like to hear from you: join our team.

Speech sounds and clarity, understanding and using language, social communication, stuttering, voice, and communication after a stroke or brain injury. It will also cover augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for people whose speech is not a reliable route — see AAC assessments — and communication intermediary services for legal, medical and government settings.

No — please do not hold out for us. Put your name on the waitlist by all means, but if your child needs speech-language support now, seek it now. Some children do catch up on their own, but nobody can tell in advance which ones, and difficulties that persist into school are strongly associated with later reading and spelling difficulties. Have hearing checked at the same time — intermittent hearing loss from glue ear is common and easy to miss. Our speech sound milestones handout sets out what to expect and when.

Some of it, and we will be clear about which. Our occupational therapists work on regulation, sensory barriers, feeding and visual supports. Our BCBA works on functional communication training — teaching a reliable way to make a need known, which is frequently the single biggest change in a household. Neither is a substitute for a speech-language pathologist, and we will say so if that is what you actually need.

AAC is augmentative and alternative communication — every way of communicating that is not speech, from picture boards to speech-generating devices. It will not stop your child talking. This is the most common worry about AAC and the evidence consistently points the other way: introducing AAC is associated with gains in natural speech, not losses. Our AAC assessment service arrives with our speech service; if you already have a system at home, our getting started with AAC handout is useful today.

Clearer, more intelligible speech; more words and longer sentences; being understood by people outside the family; a working communication system where speech is not the route; and — consistently reported by families as the biggest change — markedly less frustration for everybody.

A rough guide: if the difficulty is in doing — daily tasks, motor skills, sensory overload, routines, work or school participation — start with occupational therapy. If it is in behaviour that is unsafe, frequent, or getting in the way of everything else, start with behaviour support. If it is in communicating — being understood, understanding others, or having no reliable way to express something — speech-language pathology is the right discipline, and it is the one we do not yet have; join the waitlist, and in the meantime ask us what our OT and behaviour teams can usefully do.

If you are not sure, that is completely normal and it is exactly what the free 20-minute consultation is for. We would rather spend twenty minutes pointing you at the right service — including one that is not ours — than book you into the wrong one.

Yes, and it is common. Sensory needs and behaviour are frequently the same problem seen from two angles, and communication difficulty sits underneath a great deal of challenging behaviour. Because our teams work in one practice, you get one coordinated plan rather than two parallel ones — the therapists talk to each other, and you are not the messenger between them.

It means the assessment is shared, the goals are agreed together, and the plan says who is doing what. For example: an occupational therapist working on sensory regulation while a behaviour analyst works on the escalation pattern that regulation is meant to prevent, with one set of strategies for the family rather than two. For DSP applications and complex cases we run a single collaborative consultation with both disciplines in the same session.

Neither. No referral is needed for any of our services, and we work from what is actually difficult rather than from a label. Many of our clients are on a diagnostic waitlist or have decided not to pursue assessment at all.

We will say so. Sometimes the right answer is a physiotherapist, a psychologist, a pelvic floor physio, a dietitian, or a publicly funded service you are already eligible for. Telling you that in a free consultation costs us nothing and saves you a great deal.