Therapy Department

at the Centres for Special Education, Colaba and Bandra

A New Paradigm

We have boldly left behind a medical model of disability which highlights the disability and a total dependence on professionals.

Disability is a social construct. It is now generally accepted that societal barriers place impediments in the way of persons with disabilities to achieve their optimal levels of interactions within society. There is an urgent need to move away from perceiving disability as a medical problem. The medical model views disability as a personal tragedy and persons with disability ‘regarded as people with limitations, who cannot ensure a reasonable quality of life because of their impairment.’ Individuals with disabilities are expected to organise themselves to adapt to society. This has led to the wide-spread perception of persons with disabilities as being merely entitled to ‘benevolent humanitarianism’.

In the social model disability is perceived as a consequence of societal ‘oppression, prejudice and discrimination’ against disabled people. ‘It is society that constructs economic, social, health, architectural, legal, cultural and other barriers in order to deliberately prevent people with impairments enjoy full benefits of the society.

By far the most unique feature of the therapy department is that it is not subdivided into a department of Physio therapy and Occupational Therapy separately . This does imply that the child is seen as a whole person first and not divided into upper limbs and lower limbs.

Our team consist of occupational therapists, physio therapists, speech therapists, a medical social worker, clinical psychologists and a special educator.

The children registering in at the National Centre for Cerebral Palsy are initially assessed by the team and then enrolled for the required interventions.

The department of therapy mainly caters to children attending the special school:- These students are taken from their class on twice a week (or as per need ) for therapy after consulting with the class teachers. The parents are also involved for home programmes and follow-up

Help clinics

Every Thursday is reserved for new assessment age group of 0-14 years. A Compreh THERAPY SESSION ensive assessment is done followed by a case conference where all the team members participate and decide an effective home management programme. These children attend the centre once or twice a week for physio therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and home management programmes. For the children in the age group of 0-2 years early intervention service provides an infant stimulation programme apart from therapy. This mainly includes unstructured play activities and concept department.

Aids and Appliances

Articles of daily living are very important especially in children with cerebral palsy. Our goal remains to make them as functionally independent as possible. Occasionally we have to use aids and appliances to achieve independence. Aid and Appliances in the areas of feeding drinking seating, mobility are also designed and provided by the therapy department.

Skills Development

In a world of full of barriers especially for persons with special needs we aspire to give our children experiences of independence even outside our premises, skills like money value, shopping, handling the telephones, doorbells are some of the activities extremely difficult for our children. We arrange outings to take care of these experiences visits to restaurant, shopping areas, parks, factories are ongoing.

Parents Empowerment

We feel very strongly that parents are the best therapists, teachers, doctors to their child. It is necessary to empower the parents to enable them to have a wider perspective of the disability pertinent to them. This would help them to decide what approach is best for their child.

We organise parents training course once in 6 months for new parents for the same.

Accessibility

It is a major barrier and through our visits we bring out these issue to the society and demand a right to move about. It is extremely difficult in India with our population and conditions. However, we make the children visible and hope to make changes.