Specialized Family Type Service Established for Children with Disabilities in Tbilisi

The State, international organizations and business sector joined efforts to create family environment for children with disabilities from large scale institutions

TBILISI, Georgia, 20 December, 2018. A new Specialized Family-Type Service for Children with Severe Disabilities is being established in Tbilisi by the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health, and Social Affairswith the support of USAID and UNICEF. M2 Real Estate Company funded the construction of the alternative care facility. The company fully covered the construction costs.

Minister of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health, and Social Affair David Sergeenko, UNICEF Representative in Georgia Ghassan Khalil, USAID Mission Acting Director Adam Schmidt, and M2 Real Estate Company managing partner Shota Berekashvili who visited the center to mark the opening of the new service.  

Specialized Family-Type Service is an alternative care for 0-18-year-old children deprived of parental care and having severe/profound disabilities and complex health problems. The goal of the service is to provide beneficiaries with individual needs-based care, psychosocial assistance and create proper conditions for their development and social inclusion.

The service provides 24-hour care of the beneficiaries, including nursing care, monitoring of their health condition, provision of the programmes promoting development of the children’s physical, functional and social adaptation skills. The service is provided by the specialists of multidisciplinary team (psychologist, occupational therapists, and paediatrician) and caregivers. The service creates family-type environment for the beneficiaries and facilitates their social inclusion. 

In strong collaboration with the Ministry and through financial support of USAID, UNICEF equipped the Specialized Family-Type Service and conducted the comprehensive pre-and in-service trainings for the service personnel.  

The establishment of such services will allow the Government of Georgia to expand the alternative services for children with disabilities to gradually replace the model of institutional care for these children. Several more similar services need to be established to have the children with disabilities remaining in large institutions transferred to a family-type environment.

 Image source: Caucasus Business Week