The Interactive Café in Leeds ... some history

This week will see the final regular session of our combined Leeds & York Partnership NHS Trust and Leeds Community Healthcare 'Interactive Cafe' at Bramley Fulfilling Lives Service. To mark this final session, I have copied out a description of our Interactive Cafe from The Intensive Interaction Handbook (2nd Ed, 2018). I would just like to thanks the literally hundreds of service users, staff, parents/family members and volunteers who have supported us, and made these sessions such a truly fantastic and enjoyable aspect of our work.

An ‘Interactive Cafe’ is a pre-planned and yet informal social occasion that is specifically set up to support the use of Intensive Interaction with identified service users or clients. The relaxed cafe atmosphere is created to make everyone feel welcome, no matter how difficult they generally find social interactivity or how profound their intellectual disability.

The basic idea behind the Interactive Cafe was to disseminate the general message of Intensive Interaction, and at the same time, to increase the opportunities for everyone who might benefit from the approach to engage in and enjoy Intensive Interactions.

During each ‘Interactive Cafe’ session experienced Intensive Interaction practitioners are present to facilitate the occasion. These practitioners are available to use Intensive Interaction directly with any visiting service users. These facilitators can also offer advice on implementing Intensive Interaction to any support staff or carers who attend, and answer any other questions concerning the use of the approach.

In this way, the support staff present can see directly what Intensive Interaction might look like with the person they support. This enables the support staff or carers to realise that the skills necessary to ‘do’ Intensive Interaction are not ‘out of the ordinary’ in any way, and that Intensive Interaction is almost certainly well within their current capabilities.

During the ‘Interactive Cafe’ sessions: 

• appropriate ‘easy to read’ Intensive Interaction literature and hand-outs are available 
• Intensive Interaction DVD footage might also be shown on any available television or laptop 
• Intensive Interaction training application forms can also be left out for anyone that might be interested 
• other items made available might include various sensory or resource items that might be useful in creating and supporting joint focus interactions with specific service users 
• drinks and biscuits are usually made available at some point as well. 

As people visit more regularly, everyone gets to know each other, and the cafe can provide a comfortable arena for staff to share their experiences, and possibly their concerns, about the approach with other staff and their service users.

p.s. the ‘Interactive Cafe’ was originally facilitated in Leeds by Graham Firth and sadly missed speech and language therapist Marion Crabbe – the first session being at Potternewton Fulfilling Lives Service in early 2006.