Veritas House is expanding their provision of psychology and occupational health services to the border community, helping more local kids get the help they need, when they need it.

For more than 40 years, Veritas House has been supporting some of our vulnerable young people and today is one of the region’s largest providers of foster care and youth homelessness services

Over the past few years, the organisation has grown its own team of “in-house” clinicians, to work with children and families in their care.

But now they are making these services available to others on a fee-for-service basis.

“To date our clinicians have worked with the children, young people and families of Veritas House, but we have been fortunate enough to grow our team and now have capacity to also offer services to the broader community,” said Veritas House CEO, Jody Pearce. “Unfortunately, we are unable to offer these services for free, but we hope that they’re still a welcome addition to the availability of clinical services in our region.”

In addition to counselling services, the team of registered psychologists, clinical psychologists and provisional psychologists can deliver various assessment services for children and young people to support their learning and behaviour support needs.

The recent addition of an Occupational Therapist to the Veritas clinical team has extended this capacity further.

“We know that the need in our local community is huge for psychology and occupational therapy services.” Jody said.

“A few years ago, we committed as an organisation to growing a team of clinicians to meet not only the needs of children and young people accessing Veritas House programs, but to supporting others in our community too.

“It’s so pleasing to see that vision come to life and know that we can now help reduce waiting times for local people seeking help,” she added.

Manager of Clinical and Consultation Services at Veritas House, Peter Rohr, said the lack of available services and lengthy waitlists have had a detrimental impact on local young people.

He hopes that by offering their services to the wider community, Veritas can help make a difference.

“Our hope is that we make a contribution to the other services that are in town to reduce those wait times… to offer a service that we hope helps meet the development of social and emotional needs of children and young people – that would be our hope,” he said.

“We know it’s been a rough few years for our community and that the demand has certainly been there, as strong as ever, so we’re just really trying to make sure that Veritas as a long-standing organisation in our community is doing whatever we can to help the community at large.

FInd out more at veritashouse.org.au or call 6361 8099