Mother & Child-Prevention of Disability

It had become our practice to conduct surveys to identify children with disability and in particular intellectual disability in our low socio- economic target area. While this does result in  mothers coming to our Therapy Clinic on fixed days we realized that often they delay coming and do not come for second visits if asked to do so by the Physio thearpist or pediatrician .Reasons given vary from being too "busy" with house hold chores or caring for their other children  and being at home when they return from school. In the community where we work , schools are mostly the local government run schools i.e the Delhi Government schools run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD schools ).These schools are free and have  separate morning  sessions for girls  and for boys in the afternoons.So the reasons given by the mothers are  valid since childrens lunch has to be seen to etc.

We also realized  that  surveys are time consumimng and it takes a lot of effort by the survey worker to meet and motivate mothers to bring their children to our center. So we have recently begun cultivating parents , both mothers and fathers to become our partners and act as facilitators  to  increase the number of children being brought to the center. We call them "The Facilitators Group "at the moment  and have begun by holding some power point presentations on disability and its causes .So far only two such meetings have been held and we see that making it a social event by serving tea and biscuits makes for more particiaption.Members of this group are parents who have benefitted from our early identification and intervention services and their children are either doing well in our school or shifted to other schools where they are reportedly doing well.They realize the importance of prevention strategies for setting in of avoidable disabilities.

Although it is early days  yet to predict how successful we will be ,our focus on reaching out to parents  and in particular mothers and women in the commnunity on the benfits of early identification of disability and as far as possible prevention of children  being born with an avoidable disability will continue to be our focus.