Early care for children with disabilities, its significance and evaluation in the Pilsen and South-Bohemia district

Early intervention is a very important component of care for children with disabilities; it is vital that parents learn about its importance as soon as possible after the child?s birth or, as soon as possible after having discovered the child´s disability. Contacts on early intervention providers should be easily accessible to parents; if possible, they should be informed on the availability of early intervention by the attending physician. However, this only rarely happens, as is witnessed by the evaluation of the research processed in this thesis. The present thesis deals with the importance and evaluation of early intervention in Pilsen Region and the Region of South Bohemia as seen from the client?s point of view, i.e. from the point of view of the families with children with visual and multiple impairments. The thesis has been divided into a theoretical and a research parts. The first chapter deals with the theoretical basis of early intervention. The notion of early intervention is defined there; further to this, it gives an account of its origin and development, its distribution and legal conditions. The chapter is supplemented by an analysis of early intervention in Pilsen Region and the Region of South Bohemia, on which this work is focused. Further the present thesis discusses the issue of disability, which is closely related to early intervention. It deals with the definition of disability, the causes of its emergence, and it describes different types of disability. It also contains important information for families with children with disabilities. The concluding part of this chapter analyses the position of people with disabilities in the society. The theoretical part of the thesis has been based upon the analysis of available specialist publications and Internet sources. In the research part are defined the objectives and methods of the research, the characteristics of respondents are presented and the case studies published. Analysis and comparison of the data gathered in interviews is an important part of the research. The chapter concludes with the evaluation and conclusions of the research. The present thesis aims to evaluate the service and clients? satisfaction with early intervention service in the two selected regions. The research questions set for the research have been as follows: 1) How did the parents who found themselves in a difficult situation benefited from early intervention? 2) What would be the consequences for the families, should EIC cease to exist? To evaluate the outputs, qualitative research strategy has been chosen. The research group has included 10 families (5 of Pilsen Region and 5 of the Region of South Bohemia). A semi-structured interview has been chosen as the method of the data eliciting. The data have been processed by a qualitative content analysis. As the interviews with parents have shown, early intervention services proved very helpful to all of the families, although initially some of the parents did not know what they should expect. The main benefit everyone saw as the early intervention advisor attending them at home, showing them how to work and play with their child and how to develop its abilities. The parents also appreciated the opportunity to borrow tools and toys that most of them either would be not able to afford to buy or they would not even think such things may be used effectively as toys or tools. Everyone appreciated the psychological support they were provided with as well as the contacts on other specialists and experts; last but not least, they all enjoyed the opportunity to meet other parents. None of the respondents did note any problem nor gave any suggestion on how early intervention as presented to them should be altered or improved. The thesis will be used for the needs of Centres of Early Intervention to assess the provided services and identify those that were the most important to their clients, both former and current