Early Intervention for Mentally Disabled Infants

Learning from our past experiences ,our present focus is expanding the early intervention services. Our methodology for the Early Intervention is as follows and has been found effective given the characteristics of our target areas. The methodology is as follows;

--Create awareness and sensitize the community using puppets in the selected target area

--Follow up immediately with a Health Camp

--Identify children with any kind and degree of disability .Refer those we cannot help to other agencies .Refer the mentally handicapped to our own Rehab Clinic. Focus group 0 to 5 years of age .

--Identify women and mothers to work as survey and community workers. --Provide a one to one service through trained community workers in homes of client families .

A CHANGE IN SERVICE DELIVERY The target areas where we work have free schools and are run by the MCD, (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) and also free schools run by the Delhi Administration. The private schools charge nominally, commensurate with the low socio economic characteristic of the area. A policy decision was taken in 2002 by the MCD mandating the admission of all children disabled and non disabled but most of the schools we contacted showed little enthusiasm for the government policy .So ,implementation has not been done at all.

However we have realized that the infant and preschool child has no possibility of getting into a mainstream educational system even though the MCD ( Municipal Corporation of Delhi ) has a policy in place which mandates inclusive education .

The problem we identified through surveys and personal encounters is that the MCD schools are not trained or prepared to launch inclusive education . We do have the experience and the expertise to expand the range and scope of our early intervention services and take it onwards from identification and clinical support only and no follow ups thereafter . So, we envisage a service which will identify the child between the ages of 0 to 5 years , train the child in our inclusive Preschool set up and when the child is five, admit the child in a local mainstream school. To implement this we will do the following :-

--Increase the identification of children in the 0 to 5 age group --Train more community workers to enable such identification --Conduct more health camps, which motivates families to contact us and ensures preliminary medical inputs --Set up a unit in selected target areas where we have completed the initial awareness and health camp to ensure the continuation of early intervention services to identified children in that particular target area. --Put the necessary infrastructure in place, such as appoint a Supervisor from the target area trained by us and locating a venue for our services. --Once this “Satellite“ unit is firmly established we can move on to other target areas. --Expand the inclusive preschool we have already launched --Advocate for inclusion n the local MCD schools and ensure the admission of children with disability and particularly the mentally handicapped in mainstream schools . --Hold workshops and seminars for the Principals and staff of MCD schools for ensuring admission of children who pass out of our preschool.

• Report 2008-09 (PDF)