Please note – treatment of tongue tie if needed is at a discounted rate for babies when pre-assessed by us. Please click here to see treatment prices.
This multi-phased assessment is designed to best explore the whole picture of what’s going on for you and your baby. We’ve found this approach is incredibly effective at looking at feeding, sleep, digestion, oral function and lots more! If you’re suspecting a tongue tie, the biggest risk of treatment is reattachment of the wound site. Our assessments include evaluating whether the tie is the sole cause of problems experienced, or whether any other common problems such as tight fascia or muscles are at play. We also assess whether baby is frenulotomy ready, that is, they’re in the best position to have the tie divided.
How it works
Step 1:
A pre-consult assessment of yours and baby’s history:
You complete our comprehensive intake form – this includes a symptoms list, space for you to outline what your key concerns are, what you’d like to achieve, and a history of what’s happened before now. When you submit this and secure your slot, you’ll automatically receive an email which lists helpful clips to send us over. These include feeding, sleep, crying and some movements of your baby’s mouth – with guidance on how to collect these.
Why?
We spend time prior to your consult familiarising ourselves with your history, key concerns, the videos you’ve send and so on. This means we don’t spend half your consult time learning the basics, we can dive straight in.
When we see you in person, we only see a snapshot of how your baby is at that moment. The feed we observe, may not be a typical representation of what feeding is like for you on a daily basis, as it’s common for there to be variation at different times of day. How your baby sleeps at different times is also helpful, and you can send as many clips as you like showing us best, worse, the start, the end, what happens at 2am and so on!
These clips also enable us to visualise subtle movements in your baby’s body and mouth, as we can pause, take screen shots and share these with you. This is harder to show you effectively in person where baby is moving rapidly and we can’t pause them 😉
Step 2
We have a telephone consultation. During this call we discuss our initial findings based on your clips and form. Depending on your issue we may be able to make suggestions to create rapid improvement, such as implementing a feeding plan, ways to improve milk transfer and reduce pain or positioning techniques or winding tips based on your baby’s presentation. Mums note seeing the clips back of feeding can be a helpful way of observing themselves feeding as it’s an entirely different angle, and we often send back these images with comparison pictures to show atypical presentation.
Sometimes we arrange for you to try the suggestions, plan etc and we save the rest of your consult time for a later date, other times we move to step 3, we can use the time to best suits your needs.
Step 3
We then see you at clinic to complete any oral assessments