Firstly, can I wish all readers a Happy, and better, New Year while hoping that the same applies to Cardiff City!
In the past, the contributions from the Owl Centre on here have been written by Rhodri Lathey, but this time, I thought you’d be interested in hearing something from his wife, who is a Speech and Language Therapist and one of the owners of the centre, who has provided a review of how 2021 went for the Owl Centre.
On a personal note, I’d like to thank Rhodri and Nicola for their support in recent years which they have confirmed will continue throughout 2022.
Anyway, here’s Nicola’s report on the work of the Owl Centre in the last year;-
“Christmas has finally arrived and for some reason I have been really looking forward to it this year – maybe because last Christmas all our plans were dashed by the Covid lockdown (the most excitement we had was a drink in my mother-in-law’s garage in Bridgend in the freezing cold), or maybe because 2021 has been an incredibly busy year for The Owl Centre and me, and I’m looking forward to a little rest.
To share a short summary of the year, we have been working hard on many things:
– Continuing our pursuit to provide the very best assessment and therapy services to support families and schools who need some top-up care, which always continues to be our number 1 motivator!
– A wing of the Owl Centre became a charity in September 2020 and we are really keen to expand this – but I wish someone had warned me that running a charity was INCREDIBLY hard work!
– We became CQC registered this month. CQC is the Health Care equivalent to Ofsted and is a governing body which, believe it or not, we applied to be inspected by! After 3 fairly intensive and stressful interviews, it’s done and we did it – phew! We’ll be inspected fairly regularly from now on (although not too soon into the New Year I hope).
– We have recently picked up our 6th NHS contract to help with waiting lists for Speech and Language Therapy, OT and Autism diagnostic assessment / post-diagnostic care. We have also branched out into the disability departments of some Universities, Imperial College London being our latest, which is gorgeous at Christmas time.
– All the little training projects and supervision sessions we run to ensure our ever-expanding team of therapists are the very best they can be, which has given us the idea of starting an Owl Centre Academy next year.
– Developing a little acorn of an ADHD assessment and treatment service – watch this space…
– And of course, celebrating The Owl Centre’s 10th Birthday this month. I can hardly believe it, and wowzers – a lot has happened in those years, and although the advice is never to mix work with relationships, somehow my husband and I (who run The Owl Centre) are ok. In fact I will go as far as to say that we are good!
We’d like to wish all Cardiff City fans a happy and healthy new year, and we want to thank Paul for continuing his relationship with us as sponsors of his site.”
