Ballarat occupational therapist OT Dynamics is on the move, with a planning permit application submitted to council for a new centre on Eureka Street.
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OT Dynamics is currently based in two buildings on Creswick Road but is looking to move to a new building at 102 Eureka Street, behind the Salvation Army Ballarat Community Church.
OT Dynamics provides occupational therapy and speech therapy to adults and children, through its children's arm Dynamic Kids, and has outgrown its Creswick Road space.
The planning permit application proposes the new space to include four treatment rooms, along with office and meeting space, and an allocation of 14 dedicated car parking spaces out of 37 total off-street spaces.
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While the majority of OT Dynamics' staff work from outside the clinic, four clinicians would work on-site with office space for another 10 and three admin staff.
The building was previously vacant and has been leased to OT Dynamics by the Salvation Army through Colliers Ballarat.
OT Dynamics and Dynamic Kids director Julie Warren said it was an exciting opportunity for the business to expand.
"We're really excited that it could be a very good opportunity for our business and for the people of Ballarat and the community," she said.
"Obviously with COVID, you need more space for the density limits, so it does give us much better options in terms of having more space but also meeting the need for the community, which is huge at the moment. We've got significant waitlists, so it'll give us the option to be able to increase staff over time if we can.
"We've got the therapists, but they have to work from home because we don't have the space so it will mean that we can all operate under the one roof which is really exciting to have that option to have a big team and be able to work from the one place."
Ms Warren said the move was needed due to increased demand caused by both the growth of Ballarat and the bottleneck created by COVID restrictions in healthcare.
"COVID has also not helped at all because we've had to limit our services for the last 18 months. We went through periods where we could only see urgent clients, so that means clients that were deemed not essential or not urgent sat and waited, so now we've got to catch up on all of those," she said.
"We really want to be able to service the Ballarat community in an area which has an incredible need at the moment. I think it'll be a really good place for our clients, for our families, for the kids to come and see their clinicians, their OTs and speechies, and it'll also be a really good space for us to work as a team, to have us all on one site."
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