Parents of children with special needs are helped to care for the children and meet their needs so as to teach them to live in a community. The support is provided by Mobile Teams developed in 17 municipalities and districts of the country.
The Mobile Team provides free social, psychological, logopedic, medical and kinetotherapeutic assistance at the person’s home, with the involvement of the family. It is a service that aims to prevent the institutionalization of persons with special needs, especially children.
Marcela Dilion, project manager at Keystone Moldova, which supports the development of Mobile Teams within an EU-funded project, has told IPN that a Mobile Team can provide concomitantly services for 25 beneficiaries.
The Mobile Teams are set up under the auspices of local social assistance divisions. Owing to the shortage of logopedists, in some of the districts these specialists are replaced by pcyhopedadogues, who help the children with speech disorders.
The annual budget of the Mobile Team Service is 330,000 lei. The money is allocated from the local budgets. In large districts, where more diesel fuel is used for transporting specialists to the homes of beneficiaries or more consumables are needed, the budget rises to 400,000 lei. About 13,000 lei is allotted for a beneficiary a year.
Asked who benefits from this service, Marcela Dilion said the beneficiaries are mainly children, in some cases also adults, with serious and accentuated disabilities and more vulnerable families that face institutionalization or abandonment risks. The specialists of the Social Assistance Divisions in each district where the service is implemented are those who examine each case apart and choose the beneficiaries. For each of these, the specialists work out an individual intervention plan.
A task of the Mobile Team is to facilitate the persons’ access to social services in communities, where these exist, sometimes at national level as well. “We have very good rehabilitation centers in Chisinau, for example, and there are persons who never visited such a center because they didn’t know about their existence. There are persons with disabilities who, elementarily, haven’t seen a doctor. There are a lot of cases when the person with disability didn’t apply for a certificate to determine the disability and cannot thus apply for social welfare. The social assistant thus has the task of helping him,” stated Marcela Dilion.
She also said that where it is necessary, the beneficiaries are helped to obtain wheelchairs, orthopedic shoes, etc. There are many activities that should be performed by the authorities, but these don’t do it.
A part of the Mobile Teams were set up by the local public authorities, while others with the assistance of Keystone Moldova within a project financed by the European Union. The Mobile Team Service was first launched in 2010.
