Delta Therapy Dogs: animal assisted therapy visits with your dog

Our Collaborative Animal Assisted Therapy program is our brand-new program where we partner with organisations to deliver the therapy to adults and older people.

You and your doggo will work in collaboration with health professionals and their beneficiaries. The therapy dog is there to offer a calming presence, sometimes just to give and receive cuddles and pats, which helps the clinician to build rapport and engage the beneficiary.

Sessions (visits) can be weekly or fortnightly, or more ad-hoc, depending on your availability and the needs of the beneficiaries, and they can be scheduled at a time that suits everyone. You would need to allow 3 hours for each session which includes travel time, briefings with the clinician, and the visit itself which is usually no more than 60 minutes.

To be accepted into the program, you and your dog would need to pass our entry level assessment, and if successful, another AAT assessment -animal welfare is our top priority and we want you and your dog to enjoy volunteering with us! There's some self-paced online training involved for you at the outset, up to 10 hours, where you get the opportunity to learn more about your dog via our Delta Institute AAT course.

Volunteers already involved in our AAT program say they really enjoy getting to know their dogs better through the training and practice, as well as the joy they both get from the visits themselves.

With the launch of our new program, and with your help, we are going to significantly change the lives of even more program beneficiaries, and contribute to a new way of thinking amongst mental health specialists and other allied health professionals in the region.

If you’d like to know more, have a look at our Animal Assisted Therapy page on our Delta Therapy Dogs website.

You're also welcome to email us directly at [email protected].

We look forward to hearing from you.