EATON — Triangle Therapy Services, LLC just finished its summer camps, but what many don’t know is Triangle offers sessions all year, not just during the summer.
TTS finished its Tiny Talkers (a speech enrichment camp) and Barn Buddies (a social/recreational group for children with autism) camps on June 15. Each week two groups of 10 kids attended, for a total of 40 kids. Ten college students served as volunteers.
According to Lead Occupational Therapist and owner Margie Benge, the summer camps are how most of the community knows them. Located at 911 West Main Street in Eaton, the farm is tucked away from the road. There is a lobby and two classrooms. There is also a barn and land, where much of the learning takes place. There are obstacles for the children to face and room to hold games. There are also many animals.
Triangle Therapy Services is home to a donkey, two horses, and many goats. It is also where service dog Jarvis does much of his work, including getting pulled around on a cart by children — working on the children’s strength and proving how loving and dedicated Jarvis is to his job and the children he serves.
There are many different kinds of therapy covered at this location, including: occupational therapy, speech/language therapy, and physical therapy.
Occupational Therapy helps clients with their hand and fine motor skills, functional motor skills/coordination, self-care and daily living skills, visual-motor and perceptual skills, sensory integration/processing, and social and behavioral effects of physical/developmental disability.
Speech/Language Therapy helps clients with theirdevelopmental language, speech production, language processing disorders, feeding and swallowing, oral motor/talk tools, social language, and auditory processing.
Physical Therapy helps clients with their developmental motor assessments, gross motor skill development, motor planning development, gait training, functional mobility training, and developmental biomechanics.
According to staff, common diagnoses of clients include Cerebral Palsy, Spina Bifida, autism/PDD, Down’s Syndrome, motor delay, developmental delay, neurological disease, neurological trauma, learning disabilities, ADHD, and language delays.
Triangle also provides hippotherapy for select children. According to Triangle Therapy Services, hippotherapy is a Greek term meaning treatment with the help of a horse. It is a physical, occupational and speech therapy treatment strategy that utilizes equine movement. Hippotherapy is utilized as part of an integrated treatment program to achieve functional outcomes.
In hippotherapy, the patient engages in activities on the horse that are enjoyable and challenging. In the controlled hippotherapy environment the therapist modifies the horse’s movement and carefully grades sensory input. Specific riding skills are not taught (as in adaptive horseback riding); but rather a foundation is established to improve neurological function and sensory processing. This foundation can be generalized to a wide range of daily activities.
Triangle Therapy has one-on-one occupational, speech, and physical therapy, the Barn Buddies and Tiny Talkers camps, and social/recreational groups including Barn Buddies Sr., summer sensorimotor/language groups.
Referrals come from local physicals, pediatricians, Dayton and Cincinnati Children’s Medical Centers. They receive referrals from approximately 50 physicians.
Payer sources include: insurance billing (in network with five companies), Ohio Department of Education (Jon Peterson Scholarship Private Pay), financial assistance from Preble County Commissioner’s scholarship fund and Preble, Butler, and Montgomery County Developmental Disability programs.
Triangle serves clients ages 0-21, with the majority of clients in the 2-10 age range. They have approximately 120 active clients with 70 treatment sessions per week.
“We are a traditional pediatric therapy clinic in a non-traditional setting; utilizing animal assisted therapy and nature,” Benge said. “We have six therapists on staff. In the hippotherapy program, we have a couple horse leaders that are paid employees and we have a general aid. We have a ton of volunteers.”
Occupational Therapist Jodi Vogel, DPT OTR/L, added, “I was here for my clinical rotation in the fall, I am a new graduate. I just started at the beginning of May. I used to work in the school system for awhile, and these are much different settings.
“I like it here because, treatment wise, you have endless options,” Vogel said. “You can go out to the barn and interact with animals. You can get kids to do things with animals that you can’t normally get them to do. Going out to the woods, there are a lot of balancing and coordination activities. I like it because there are a lot of options and you can work with a lot of different things. The kids are great and Jarvis is awesome.”
