What To Look For In An Intervention Center

By: Nicholas Ramazon, MPS, Rachel Piper, LMSW, Melanie Rose, B.A. & Suzi Naguib, PsyD.

Struggling to navigate the early intervention world? Don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’ve found multiple centers but don’t know which one is best for your child? Well, your feelings are valid and many caregivers are feeling the same way. Finding an appropriate and comprehensive early invention program can be challenging. Simply put, there is a wide range of centers, and finding the right one for your child can be a daunting task. There is no “one-size-fits-all”, which is why we created this blog to help families understand what qualities make an early intervention center strong.

A quality comprehensive early intervention center will incorporate a variety of key components, in addition to their own unique characteristics. However, the following components represent the core qualities that we feel are necessary for an excellent early intervention center: a highly trained staff, effective delivery of services, well-designed learning activities, supportive scheduling, and superb communication.

Highly Trained Staff

Clinicians are one of the main success factors of any early intervention center. You and your child will rely on them to provide the highest quality of clinical care possible, while also meeting you at your level to assess your child’s needs, develop strong intervention plans, and implement a high quality of care. Effective early interventionists will provide these exceptional services, while showing the child empathy, warmth, and care.

Additionally, your early intervention center should follow a team-based approach to working with your child. A comprehensive early intervention center should include a team of speech therapists, occupational therapists, behavioral therapists, psychologists, and social workers. Ideally, your child will have the opportunity to work with each professional, depending on their individual needs. Programs should also be staffed at a level which provides the opportunity for small clinician-child ratio (e.g., one-on-one)

Along with having highly trained staff, the programs at the center should be routinely evaluated to assess effectiveness of the current procedures and to determine areas of improvement. To this regard, it is important that the center is not only collecting data on how the child is doing but also how the clinician is doing. It is important that the center evaluates the clinician to determine how they are implementing your child’s individual plan, and to work with them to support better treatment implementation.

Delivery of Services

A well-rounded early intervention center will provide a combination of individual services, as well as an integration of services, where children receive a variety of therapies at once. Examples of these include, Behavioral Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech and Language Therapy. Additionally, you want interventions to address functional skills concurrently, such as, social skills, play skills, cognitive skills, social skills, emotional regulation, self-help or adaptive skills, communication skills, amongst other goals set with you and your provider.

With regard to services, it is important to pick the most appropriate and effective treatment for your child. Therefore, it is helpful for the center to deliver a four step process to ensure this happens: (1) Assessment, (2) Implementation, (3) Evaluation and (4) Generalization.

1. Assessment: Evidence-based assessment involves using research and theory to guide the best method for evaluating a student’s current abilities. It is used to gauge where the child is at and to develop a baseline for their behaviors or challenges at hand. Once this data has been collected, it is essential to create short-term and long-term goals that can be achieved through an integration of services and interventions.
2. Implementation: Employing effective interventions is a process of assuring the key components of the intervention are put into practice and used in the uppermost standards. Again, one size does not fit all and therefore, it may take time and regular assessment to determine the best implementation strategies for supporting your child.
3. Evaluation: Monitoring a child’s progress is used to assess whether or not your child is making progress towards their individual goals. To do this, frequent data must be collected to assess how your child is responding to the intervention (i.e., step two), and to make changes as necessary. If a child is not progressing as expected, it is important to re-evaluate and assess what components of the intervention are not working.
4. Generalization: Once the first three steps are completed, it is beneficial to have a generalization component where the child uses their new skills and applies them outside of the center. Clinicians can work with the family to help children transfer their skills to the community, home, and school settings.

Well-Designed Learning Activities

The learning environment created by clinicians is critical to the quality of any early intervention center. First, a supportive learning environment where the child is seen, heard, and understood is essential. A strong intervention center will take time to get to know the child before moving forward with intervention. Next, it is important to have natural learning opportunities for children to work on adaptive skills, such as exercising choices. To this regard, an early intervention center can set up natural opportunities for children to decide what they want to play with, which room they want to work in , or maybe even what art project they want to create.

Peer-to-peer opportunities are when children have the chance to work with one another, which can be child-centered play or child-led play. As long as children have the chance to engage with one another, it opens up opportunities for them to learn from each other. Next, it is important to have a well-resourced room. These resources may include: academic material, toys, games, art materials, etc. Lastly, it is important to have an indoor and outdoor facility, as working outdoors further encourages peer connections in a natural environment.

Scheduling

Effective early intervention requires a consistent and steady schedule of services. Because of this, it is important to minimally schedule hour-long sessions on a weekly basis. This will vary based on individualized assessments and needs. A child who receives weekly services will make greater gains because they will have more opportunities to learn and work on their skill development. In contrast, an inconsistent schedule of services can cause confusion and lead to less efficient outcomes (Powell & Appelton, 2012). Simply put, research has shown that consistent care leads to better and more efficient outcomes.

Communication

A high-quality early intervention program recognizes that multiple teams are essential to a child’s educational and developmental success. Early intervention centers should have effective communication and engagement strategies developed that encourage all stakeholders to participate in the child’s learning and to promote a two-way communication system (Wechsler, Melnick, Maier, & Bishop, 2016). Strong communication and balanced partnerships must be established between many teams in order to provide effective early intervention:

1. Between providers and the center: Good communication between providers allows for services to be integrated. It also provides collaborative opportunities where your child can receive services in a variety of settings.
2. Between schools and the center: Children spend a large portion of their day at school. Through communication with teachers, early intervention workers can receive feedback about your child’s progress generalizing skills, and subsequently select services that will be most appropriate for your child. Likewise, the early intervention center can also provide resources and strategies to be used at school.
3. Between parents and the center: Good early intervention is family-centered. Therefore, communication between families and the center is important. Quality communication between clinicians and families can encourage parental involvement and offer a more complete understanding of home factors that may influence a child’s classroom behavior and individual needs. It also allows family members to be strong advocates in the decision making process.
4. Culturally-informed communication: Communication in a culturally responsive way means discovering, learning, and recognizing what makes a family unique and then adapting your communication style to work effectively with one another within the uniqueness of each other’s culture. Having culturally-informed communication allows families to feel respected and valued at the center, leading to better results for your child.

References:

Powell, C., & Appleton, J. V. (2012). Children and young people’s missed health care appointments: reconceptualising ‘Did Not Attend’ to ‘Was Not Brought’ – a review of the evidence for practice. Journal of Research in Nursing, 17(2), 181–192.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1744987112438158

Wechsler, M., Melnick, H., Maier, A., & Bishop, J. (2016). The Building Blocks of High-Quality Early Childhood Education Programs. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/building-blocks-high-quality-early-childhood-education-programs.