Service Spotlight: Children’s Occupational Therapy 🔦

For today's Service Spotlight, we’re highlighting the Children’s Occupational Therapy (OT) team - a skilled and compassionate group who support children and young people to participate in the everyday activities that matter most to them.

We spoke with Jane and Joanne, two of the occupational therapists in the team within East Ayrshire, to learn more about what OT looks like, how families can access support, and what makes their service special.

What Is Occupational Therapy?

Jane and Joanne explain that occupational therapy is all about supporting people to take part in the activities (or “occupations”) that make up their daily lives.

For children and young people, those occupations include:

• getting up, dressed and ready in the morning

• going to school

• playing with friends

• participating in hobbies

• developing independence across everyday routines

  
  

OTs look at what makes these activities difficult and explore ways to support children to do the things they need and want to do.

These challenges might relate to:

• coordination

• dressing skills

• feeding

• sensory processing

• motor skills

• confidence and independence

  
  

Not every child needs an OT assessment, but when challenges are getting in the way of daily life, OT can make a meaningful difference.

Who Can Be Referred?

One of the most important messages from Jane and Joanne is this:

A diagnosis is not required to access Occupational Therapy.

OT is open to children and young people who are experiencing significant difficulties with everyday tasks, regardless of diagnosis.

This could include situations where a child or young person:

• is struggling to take part in daily routines

• is unable to attend school because of functional challenges

• needs support to build independence

• is finding key tasks harder than expected for their age

• is not managing activities their peers can usually do

  
  

Many families can use strategies at home or receive support from school, but when difficulties are persistent and significantly impacting wellbeing or participation, OT can help.

Open Access: How Families Can Get Support

Full details for the occupational therapy team offerings in North and South Ayrshire can be found here: NHS Ayrshire & Arran - Children and Young People's Occupational Therapy Service

The East Ayrshire OT service is designed to be accessible, flexible and responsive.

Telephone Advice Line - 07584 174110

• Open every Thursday afternoon

• Families, education staff and professionals can speak directly with an OT

• Many issues can be supported with advice straight away

• No obligation and no automatic referral

  
  

Clinical Mailbox - aa.childrenyoungpeoplesoccupationaltherapyeast@aapct.scot.nhs.uk

• Open to parents, carers, school staff and young people aged 12+

• A space to ask questions, share concerns and seek tailored advice

• No referral needed

• No limit to how many times someone can get in touch

  
  

Often, a single conversation is enough to offer reassurance and provide practical strategies. Not every child needs one‑to‑one therapy - sometimes the right advice at the right time makes all the difference.

Monthly Virtual Drop‑Ins

The team also run a joint ASD virtual drop‑in with Speech and Language Therapy:

• Held once a month

• No diagnosis required

• Parents and carers can discuss their individual concerns

• A chance to get advice from both OT and Speech and Language Therapy in one place

  
  

This offers gentle, accessible support without needing to join a waiting list.

More details can be found here: East Ayrshire Drop-In for Parent/Carers: Service Spotlight 🔦

Workshops Delivered With NEST

OTs across Ayrshire also work in partnership with NEST to deliver free workshops, including:

• Introduction to Anxiety Management

• Introduction to Sensory Processing

• Understanding Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD)

These workshops offer:

• practical strategies

• clear explanations

• follow‑up advice

• a chance to speak directly with OTs

  
  

One of the biggest benefits is peer support.

Parents and carers often tell us that hearing from others with similar experiences is just as valuable as the professional advice.

Celebrating Differences

Jane and Joanne finish with a powerful reminder:

Every child has strengths.

Every child finds their own way of doing things.

Different does not mean less.

And difference is something to celebrate.

The OT service is here to help children build on their strengths, find strategies that work for them, and feel confident in who they are.

Watch the Video 🎥

Hear directly from Jane and Joanne about Occupational Therapy.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/445ed5_bbbf54f28c604dbd84975d8754e0d178/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

📄 Read the Full Transcript

The full transcript of Jane and Joanne’s video is available below for accessibility and ease of use.

Occupational Therapy Transcript.pdf

Download PDF • 42KB

📝 Full Video Transcript

Occupational Therapy Service Spotlight – Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2026 – Full Video Transcript

I'm Jane. I'm one of the occupational therapists working in East Ayrshire.

And I'm Joanne, and I'm also an occupational therapist.

So occupational therapy is a profession that looks at what people's occupations are, and that's really simple — it's all the things you have to do in a day or you want to do in a day.

We work in children's services, so all those things are like going to school, playing with your friends, getting up in the morning and getting dressed. So that's your occupation, and we really look at what's making it difficult for that child or young person to do what they need to do or what they want to do.

And that can be lots of reasons.

So we look at, as Joanne's talking about, activities of daily living — things like dressing skills, feeding skills, coordination skills and sensory processing needs.

Not everybody needs an occupational therapy assessment for those things.

And we would like to highlight that we're open for referrals, but for children who are having significant difficulties participating in everyday tasks.

As Joanne was saying, we're open to people with or without a diagnosis, but it's really around what the challenges are and how big they are. Because lots of people have difficulty doing what they need to do, but they'll find a way around it. There are strategies they can use to do it. But maybe we can help a wee bit more if it's a child or young person who’s really not able to do the things that their peers are doing at that age, or not able to get to school because of significant challenges.

There are lots of services that offer really good advice around things that may be causing difficulty.

We have open access. Anyone can refer in to OT.

We work in three different locality teams: North, South and East. Joanne and I both work in East Ayrshire, so we've got a telephone advice line that's open on a Thursday afternoon where you can phone in and speak directly with an OT.

We also have a clinical mailbox that anyone — parents, education staff, and the young person themselves if they're over the age of 12 — can email in to.

You don't need a diagnosis and you don't need to be referred in by somebody else.

When people phone the advice line, we're often able to give some advice over the phone or some support at that time. It doesn't mean that everyone is going to then need a full referral into the service. Not everybody needs to be waiting on a waiting list or seen on a one-to-one basis.

Quite often when we have that conversation on the phone, either with the parent or carer or school staff or whoever it is, together we can come up with some solutions and they can go ahead and practise what it is and put that into place.

That might be the solution, or it might be that they can use our mailbox again in the future. There's no limit to how many times somebody can contact us.

We also offer an ASD drop-in with a speech and language therapist. That's a virtual drop-in we run once a month. Again, you don't need a diagnosis, and there will be an OT and a speech and language therapist who run that clinic.

We offer advice and support tailored around your individual child or young person's needs.

We also do workshops with NEST — looking at an introduction to anxiety management, an introduction to sensory processing and developmental coordination disorder.

Generally, that's two OTs who work across either North, South or East Ayrshire.

We offer advice and support at the end of those sessions if you're wanting to speak to us about a child or young person as well.

The benefits of those workshops include the peer support that parents and carers get when they come along. Sometimes that's just as important as the advice we're giving because they are then sharing tips. That means they often don't need a referral into our service because all that advice and information is there at the time.

I think it's really important just to celebrate that — to give everybody a voice and acknowledge that it doesn't really matter if you're different from typical. It doesn't matter if you're different.

Everybody has their own strengths and can find their own ways of doing things. We should be celebrating that. We should be celebrating differences