Development of a system providing early assistance to children and their families in the Russian Federation

BACKGROUND: The concept of developing a system of comprehensive rehabilitation and habilitation of people with disability in the Russian Federation, including children with disabilities, for the period up to 2025, includes providing early assistance to children and their families initially, contributing to the early identification of impaired functions in children, subsequent routing of children with disabilities, and prevention of disability in children.

AIM: This study aimed to analyze the development of a system providing early assistance to children and their families in the Russian Federation.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Metadata of target programs were analyzed for the development of comprehensive rehabilitation and habilitation of people with disability. This system provides early assistance to the population of the Russian Federation. Data obtained from the monitoring of the early assistance system, including 83 indicators, in four directions, were analyzed: organizations providing early assistance services, children in need of early assistance and who received it, specialists providing early assistance services (form 1-RP), and during the period of implementation of the “concept of development of early assistance in the Russian Federation until 2020.”

RESULTS: The relevance of forming an early assistance system is considered from a demographic, neurobiological, biopsychosocial, organizational, social, and socioeconomic point of views. The number of children in need of early assistance increased from 296.2 thousand in 2017 to 407.0 thousand in 2019, accounting for 3.9% of all children aged 0–3 years. The number of children who received early assistance services increased from 223.4 thousand in 2017 to 340.5 thousand in 2019, and the coverage rate of the target group of children with early assistance among the total population of the Russian Federation was 83.7% in 2019. Factors that hindered the development of the early assistance system in the Russian Federation were regulatory and legal, informational, organizational and content, personnel, conceptual, and categorical.

CONCLUSIONS: In the Russian Federation, conditions have been created for the development of early assistance to children and their families at a new level. In the drafted federal law, early assistance is allocated as a separate direction of state policy, and the need for a synergy of administration bodies and departments (health care, social protection, and education) on unified technologies was noted. Several issues remain unresolved, namely, staffing policy, interagency cooperation, financial and economic issues, and others.