Developmental Trends in the Field of Early Care

This thesis dealt with trends within early intervention programs. Early intervention is a social service aimed at helping familimies and children with developmental delays or disabilities since birthday till the age of 7 years. It is a field service with vast majority of work being done within family environment, rarely accompanied by an ambulance service. This provides a great benefit, as is mentioned in theoretical part of thesis. Multitude of new developments concerning education, financing or work itself happened in the last couple years. The theoretical part of thesis defines the early intervention itself, or "early care" in some Czech translations, as well as its history. Methods for client service are described as well. The main objective of this thesis is to describe main changes that happened within in several South Bohemia early intervention centers in the last 10 years. This goal should provide a summary of both operational and financial challenges as well as new early intervention methods for better work with client himself. The practical part of this uses a qualitative approach. A semi-structured interview consisting of 10 questions is employed, with 5 professionals from early intervention care from 3 centers in South Bohemia as respondents. Their professions are described in order to compare differences between opinions of administrative workers and care assistants. The interview was most concerned with changed made because of new trends, and whether those were concerned to be positive or negative. Answers were analyzed with the use of clustering method. In conclusion, vast differences were observed in early intervention field 10 years ago and today. Both methods of financing and education of assistants as well as enlargement of number of workers or capacity of centers changed greatly within the past decade. The results could be used as feedback for early intervention centers and students concerned with this particular field of social care