The Allied Health team at Orbost Regional Health (ORH) provides many different services, including speech pathology, dietetics, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and allied health assistants.
Speech pathologist, Amber Tester, helps children with speaking difficulties in the early part of their life and also helps people who may have difficulties talking after a stroke.
Amber supports people who have difficulty swallowing and guides them in managing these issues.
Dietitian, Thorsten Kasel, provides advice about healthy eating and food choices. He supports you to stay as healthy as possible and avoid getting sick.
Thorsten can also help with eating disorders, food allergies, diabetes and heart health, eating to help improve your weight and keep your bones strong.
This improves joint pain in long-term conditions such as osteoarthritis.
It is important to remember that dietitians don’t tell you to eat less, they tell you to eat more of the good stuff.
Occupational therapists, Yin Ten and Kirsty Herbert, support you to become more independent in your daily living. They help children with development delays and people with disabilities or recovering from illness or injury to stay safe and be independent in their home or work environment.
Hand therapy and lymphoedema management is also provided.  
Physiotherapist, Mitch Schwenke, provides exercises and other therapies to improve movement, reduce pain and speed up healing.
The aim is to increase muscle strength so that clients are able to do their normal daily activities.
Physiotherapy can also help to ease the effects of long-term diseases such as osteoarthritis.
The ORH allied health team provides exercise classes for people with balance issues, high risk of falls or need exercise to get them back to their full ability.

IMAGE: Orbost Regional Health speech pathologist, Amber Tester, occupational therapist, Yin Ten, allied health assistant, Lyndy Fitzsimmons, and physiotherapist/allied health team leader, Mitch Schwenke. (PS)