Guest blog by Verity Sowden, Marketing and Events Coordinator, MOVE Programme
The MOVE Programme (MOVE) is an activity-based functional skills framework that is used to teach disabled young people the skills of head control, sitting, standing, walking and transitioning. It is underpinned by three core principles:
- Opportunities: children learn and develop through being given opportunities to move and explore. MOVE supports settings to find the best times throughout the day to incorporate movement opportunities for their children.
- Motivation: children are more likely to engage in activities that are meaningful to them. MOVE provides a framework to identify and work towards motivating goals that will make the biggest difference to the child and their family.
- Progress: children make the most progress when someone believes in their abilities. MOVE is a ‘can do’ approach that sets the bar high for disabled children, encouraging them to work towards their goals and celebrating every achievement, big or small.
At its core, MOVE is focused on providing disabled young people with regular, motivating opportunities to increase their independence. But what does ‘independence’ look like? Many people would think it looks like a child walking down a corridor without anyone holding their hand or sitting on a classroom chair without anyone holding them steady, but ‘independence’ can also look like a child walking in a gait trainer to return the class register to school reception or by sitting in a supportive chair to take part in a music lesson with their friends. Indeed, for many disabled young people, particularly those with complex needs, support from specialist equipment is a key feature of their independence, and as such their equipment should be adjustable and adaptable for everyday activities.
Good positioning is key for young people with complex physical and medical needs, but good posture doesn’t need to be passive posture. As the UK distributor of Jenx and Rifton products, Jiraffe provides equipment that is well-suited for supporting MOVE. Both Jenx and Rifton design products that keep function as well as form in mind.
Participation and active engagement
For disabled children using postural care equipment, it can be easy for them to feel cut-off and isolated. If a child remains in a fully supported and reclined seated position for the majority of their day, not only will this have a negative effect on their physical health, but it will also impact their mental health as it prevents them from interacting meaningfully with others. It is therefore important that disabled children get the opportunity to assume upright and forward leaning positions for key activities like play and learning. For example, supported standing opens a child up to a new perspective through which they can view the world and places them at eye level to interact with their family and friends, and features such as hi-lo bases and tilt-in-space on chairs can encourage easier/better transfers into different positions throughout the day.
But it is not only the core features of a piece of specialist equipment that can facilitate greater participation. Equipment designed with a range of accessories and optional extras, enables each piece of equipment to be adapted to a disabled child’s individual needs, and ensure that they always have the correct amount of support for the activity that they’re engaging with. For example, a seating system that comes with adjustable or removable head rests, harnesses and trays means that a child can exercise their trunk strength and head control when engaging in motivating play, and also relax in a more fully supported position when they need to rest.
Postural Management
Postural Management is at the heart of Jiraffe and Jenx’s ethos, distributing postural care equipment that supports children to adopt comfortable and functional positions throughout their day. The key principles of Postural Management which inform Jenx and Rifton’s designs align strongly with the MOVE approach and ethos:
- Functional performance: Function is paramount in the MOVE approach. MOVE focuses not on sets of exercises but key motivational activities that the disabled young person enjoys and that will make life easier for their family. For example, a static standing exercise can be transformed into key activity to support with personal care, because if a child can stand holding onto a bar or their parent/carer’s shoulders for a couple of minutes while they are changed, they will not need to be laid down on a public toilet floor if there are no Changing Places toilets available.
- Reduced harm to body systems: The link between physical activity and improved physical health is well known, particularly in the case of upright positioning and standing. MOVE supports a child to be active and provides a structured framework for the people supporting them to change their positioning multiple times a day, thus reducing the potential harm of remaining in a static position.
- Energy Efficiency: Learning new skills takes time and energy, and it can be tempting to over-prompt a disabled child when supporting them to avoid fatigue and potential injury. MOVE uses the Just Manageable Difficulty (JMD) level to find the balance between providing a child with enough independence to develop their skills and providing enough support to prevent them from tiring and hurting themselves.
Working in tandem, MOVE and equipment providers like Jiraffe and Jenx enable disabled young people to adopt active positions so that they can engage independently with daily tasks, which significantly improves their wellbeing and health.
Find out more about MOVE on our website: www.moveeurope.org.uk
This guest blog is part of our 40 stories for 40 years’ series, celebrating our partnerships over the years. Click here to read more blogs in this series.
