19
Dec
2019
As you know, therapies such as Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy are crucial to support the development of children with Down syndrome in the early years.
We are regularly contacted by members highlighting difficulties in accessing early services, and would like to get a good picture of the services which are available in your area and whether they are meeting your needs.
In order to do this, we need your help. We are working with University College Cork (UCC) to gather and analyse information – We are asking all families who have a child aged 0 – 6 to complete a survey.
The survey focuses on describing Early Intervention during 2019. There are questions about what kind of early intervention services were available, and how often. It would also be useful to know whether regular access to early intervention has any impact on family stress levels, so there are a few questions about stress. It is quite a detailed survey, and we anticipate it will take around 5-10 minutes to complete.
We need written consent from you to share the survey data with the university. The surveys will be separated from the consent forms in order to anonymise the information, then two final year Speech and Language Therapy students will analyse the anonymised surveys and prepare a detailed report about Early Intervention for children with Down syndrome in Ireland in 2019.
We will then use this information to highlight issues and lobby for better services for you and your child – Please take the survey here…
If you have any further questions, please contact either our Early Years Specialist – Olive Buckeridge at olive@downsyndrome.ie or our Member Support Team Leader – Nicola Hart at nicola@downsyndrome.ie.
