Completed projects

The Union of Special Educators and Rehabilitators of the Republic of North Macedonia with the financial support of UNICEF and the British Embassy from August 2019 to January 2021 implemented the project Care in the community for children with disabilities and their families whose main goal was to provide community services to children with disabilities and their families through the establishment of new forms of services - early intervention for children with disabilities from 0 to 6 years and psychosocial support of their parents/guardians, with additional provision of online early intervention through a specially designed E-platform, as well as providing professional interventions in the home for children aged 6 to 18 years with severe and most severe intellectual disabilities, i.e. combined disabilities and complex problems.

As part of the project activities, a Center for early intervention and support of children with disabilities and their families was opened in the central city area of the City of Skopje, which was attended by children from 0 to 6 years old who had developmental delays and/or disabilities. The following activities were carried out in the Center:

- assessment of the children's needs for rehabilitation and assessment of the family's needs for support;
- individual and group work with children (treatments and interventions);
- individual and group work with parents (providing psychosocial support).

The team that was hired consisted of two special educators and rehabilitators, a speech therapist, a physiotherapist, a psychologist, as well as a consultant for direct early intervention services who had the role of coordinating, monitoring and evaluating the interventions provided by team members, and a consultant for online services for early intervention who, in turn, coordinated the team's activities in the delivery of online services for early intervention implemented through the platform.

In the course of the project, a total of 67 assessments were made of children with disabilities, i.e. with developmental delays and their families. Initial interviews and screening were conducted with all these children and families, followed by a developmental assessment according to which plans were developed for the delivery of early intervention services that they received either at the Center for Early Intervention and Family Support or in the home, but also online. through the platform.

The psychologist from the team was responsible for making the initial contact with the families in order to familiarize the parents with the early intervention program and to make an assessment of the family's needs. After the initial screening, the psychologist presented each individual case to other team members (including the consultant) to determine the strategies, activities, interventions that would be most appropriate, and a shared decision was made as to which team member would be the primary provider. of early intervention services, and then primary providers were in charge of delivering the interventions. The primary provider was responsible for the preparation of all child/family documentation and the development of intervention plans.

A total of 24 children/families were provided with early intervention at home, 37 children/families were provided with early intervention at the Center for Early Intervention and Family Support. The rest of the children/families were given online early intervention through the developed platform. A total of 247 home-based early interventions and 735 community-based early interventions were provided. In addition, the psychologist-psychotherapist regularly provided psychosocial support to the parents/families, so a total of 53 psychosocial support sessions were provided.

Within the framework of the project, the E-platform ranaintervencija.mk was created. on which you can find different contents (texts, photos, presentations, videos), as well as proposals for incentives through which the various development areas are encouraged, i.e. proposals for strategies, approaches and methods for working with children with different types of disabilities, such as and advice for parents. In order to ensure accessibility to a wider target group, the contents of the platform are in Macedonian and Albanian. At the same time, the platform enabled personalized early intervention services, as well as psycho-social support for families. Over 50 publicly available content was uploaded, a total of 42 personalized profiles were created for the users of the platform and the same number of child and family focused early intervention plans were defined for each child/family which were then implemented by the multidisciplinary team. First, the platform was promoted on the Facebook profile of UNICEF MK, and then on the official website of the Union of Special Educators and Rehabilitators, as well as on the social networks of the Union and the groups of parents of children with disabilities on Facebook, and also on the deca.mk portal.