Newcastle is the largest centre in the Hunter, and the people we support stretch well beyond the city, out around Lake Macquarie through Charlestown and Cardiff, up the valley toward Maitland, and across the older inner suburbs like Hamilton. These areas don't all sit close together, so we combine in-person visits with remote and telehealth support to keep sessions regular without families spending half a day in the car.
As a regional and post-industrial city that has changed a great deal, Newcastle has good local services but not always the depth of behaviour support practitioners you'd find in Sydney, which can mean longer waits. We aim to help by drawing on practitioners familiar with the Hunter and using telehealth where it fits, so a family in Maitland or a participant near Lake Macquarie isn't held back by distance or thin local availability.
A participant in the Hunter might see a school one day, an allied health provider the next and a support coordinator after that, and it's easy for the message to drift a little at each stop. We stay in regular contact with those people so the behaviour support approach a family agrees to is the same one being used in the classroom and in the community, not three loosely related versions of it.