October 10-12 in Kharkiv (in the Palace of Students of the Law Academy) will be held International conference on early intervention - the system of work with young children with special needs and their families. This is the first time that Ukraine has hosted the conference, which the European Association for Early Intervention (EA) holds annually in a different European country. It will bring together professionals and parents from Ukraine, the United States, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, Tajikistan, the Netherlands, Portugal, and other countries.

This year's theme is "Towards a new paradigm - through partnerships between professionals, families and society".

At the conference, among other things, present the first results of the pilot project on RW, which takes place in Kharkiv, Zakarpattia, Lviv, and Odesa regions.

One of the speakers at the conference will be Lady Philippa Russell, one of the people who made the UK one of the best systems in the world for providing services to children with disabilities and their families. Fifty years ago, Philippa refused to send her child with a disability to an institution and has devoted her entire life to fighting for the rights of children and families.

International donors have already paid for the participation of about sixty parents and thirty professionals from Ukraine: OSF-ECP, the British Embassy and UNICEF Ukraine. The organizers also call on Ukrainian philanthropists and local community leaders, managers of medical and educational institutions to help participate in the conference parents of special children, professionals (psychologists, teachers, doctors...) and students. You can register for participation on the conference website.

Participants will gain up-to-date knowledge on the use of EB methods for working with children and families, and will engage in the development of the parent movement, exchange experience from different countries on strategies for implementing EB in communities, and analyze legal models for building an EB system in different countries. In addition to master classes, discussions, and presentations by scientists, practitioners, and program developers, participants will also be interested in joint presentations by parents who have received the service with the professionals who provided it.

One of the priority topics of the international meeting will be the implementation of an early intervention system at the national level. There are only about forty RV teams in Ukraine, and this is catastrophically insufficient, since there are tens of thousands of potential recipients of the service.

"The United States once enshrined early intervention services in law, making them available to every family in need in every remote corner of the countryAnna Kukuruza, co-organizer of the conference and head of the Early Intervention Institute, says. Portugal was the first European country to introduce the concept of EC into the law. Its experience in building an EC system is particularly interesting for us, as it is also a country with a crisis economy. Different countries have different approaches to creating a system, but the main thing is that there are fewer and fewer European countries where the state allows itself to ignore this service, where communities do not invest in the health of children and the well-being of families. Ukraine, in particular, needs widespread and high-quality provision of this service, The adoption of the law on EI, the introduction of the concept of early intervention into the legislative field would help".

On the eve of the conference, Ana Serano, Head of the European Association for the Developmentally Disabled, will conduct a three-day training for NGOs from different countries working to provide services to children with special needs and their families. The experience of Portugal, Bulgaria, Georgia, Tajikistan and other countries will be analyzed in the context of Ukrainian realities and decentralization - the role of communities in service provision.

Lawyers agree: there are many options for building a system of RV in Ukraine and the role of communities should be dominant here: "It is entirely within the community's power to create an integrated, comprehensive service where a family doctor and a social worker will take care of the family, identify problems at their initial stage, and support the family at all stages of rehabilitation, integration and socialization of the child," said Tetyana Havrysh, managing partner of ILF, who has been advising the Association of Neonatologists of Ukraine for many years.

The sooner the problem is identified, the more chances there are to effectively help the child and family, says Anna Kravtsova, a psychologist at the Institute of Early Intervention. "It can be difficult for parents to determine whether a child's difficulty is a normal stage of development or a signal of a problem, and experts sometimes use 'comforting phrases' like 'wait, he'll outgrow it. But the most important developmental processes occur in the first years of life. Therefore. It is important to educate everyone who works with children and parents-medics, educators, psychologists, social workers- to be able to recognize the problem in time and recommend early intervention services to the family".

Among the key speakers of the conference are: Ana Serano, PhD, Head of the European ECD Association (Portugal); José Boavida, Coordinator at the Portuguese Ministry of Health's Office of the National Early Intervention System; Marilyn Espe-Schervindt, PhD, Head of Federal and State ECD Projects in the United States; Naira Avetisyan, Head of the Child Protection Department at UNICEF Ukraine, who has been involved in the development of ECD programs in East Asia and the Pacific and the protection of children's rights in the former Soviet countries, Vietnam and Syria; Tetyana Mishchuk, head of the EI department at the Dzherelo Children's Rehabilitation Center (Lviv, Ukraine); Yaroslava Nykanshyn, head of the Parents for Early Intervention movement; Noor van Loen, member of the Dutch parent organization BOSK; Emily Vargas-Baron, director of the RISE Institute, expert on planning and analysis of national EI policy, and others.

The conference will be held with the support of the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine and the European Union Twinning project ("Support to Ukrainian authorities in developing a legislative and administrative framework for the implementation of a system of early intervention and rehabilitation of children with disabilities and children at risk of disability"), the Open Society Foundations (OSF), and UNICEF Ukraine.