Confident Start is a joint program by the KPMG Charitable Foundation and its partners, the Remedial Education Center, “Prostranstvo Obshcheniya” and “Yelizavetinsky Sad,” who work together to help children with severe movement disorders and multiple development disorders. The program focuses on early intervention services provided to families free of charge in their homes.
Support
- Health care
- Helping children with severe illnesses and development disorders
Beneficiaries
- Children with severe illnesses and development disorders
- Their families
Project working language: Russian
Time frame: since 2017 till now
Status: active
Updated: 13.01.2020
Contact details
Anastasia Gerasimova
CSR team supervisor
agerasimova@kpmg.ru
+7 (495) 937-4477
Project web-site
https://confidentstart.ru/
Social media
Video
KPMG Charitable Foundation
Social challenge and reasons for project’s initiation
Immediacy of the social problem
External reasons for project’s initiation
Internal reasons for project’s initiation
Target audience and stakeholders of the project
The program’s target audience consists of families with children under 3 years old with severe movement disorders and multiple development disorders. Most of these children have cerebral palsy or genetic syndromes.
Stakeholders include relevant Moscow City and Moscow Oblast authorities, departments of health care and social security, the professional community of doctors and caring profession specialists.
Mission and goals
The mission of Confident Start is to offer quality and affordable early intervention services to families who have children under three years old with severe movement disorders and multiple development disorders, in their homes. The objective is to help the child develop new skills, adapt the environment, prevent secondary complications, educate the parents and improve the quality of life for the child.
In addition to the child’s development, the second most important objective is to improve the parents’ condition:
- reduce stress
- make the parents better aware of their child’s special needs
- give them a better understanding of the resources they will need to have a normal life under the new circumstances and motivate them to be more active in locating such resources
- encourage them to take care of themselves and their interests
- motivate them to resume their professional careers
- recommend that they maintain and expand their social ties
- encourage them to have more children
Project description
Team and partners
Team
Partners
Resources
Financial resources
Human resources
Technological and material resources
Achieved results
Immediate results:
The program’s capacity is 90 children simultaneously. In 2018, 165 families received our services. As of October 1, 2018, we had a total of 254 participating children. Since the program was established, over 350 children went through it. Yet demand clearly exceeds the available supply, as official statistics alone show that there are about 1500 such children in Moscow.
Since the program is a three-year pilot, we don’t have complete results at this point. Yet we do have some intermediate results, and they look very interesting. The program specialists presented them in 2018 and 2019 at Russian and international conferences (in France and Georgia). Please see the attached deck of slides the specialists used in France. The report shows which categories of children have made progress in what areas, how parents’ satisfaction changed over time, and in which areas children developed new functional skills more often. Another important indicator is how often children achieve their goals under their personal development plans. It is currently at 65%, which is very good for children with severe disorders. All the goals are set in the SMART system which provides objective assessment of whether the goal has been reached.
Social results:
The program’s team thinks quality feedback is extremely important. We have been gathering feedback in various forms from the very first day, which helps us to see how our performance changes over time, when things improve and what needs some adjustment. The following is a list of feedback types, audiences and frequency of feedback collections:
| Assessed area | Frequency | Scale |
| The child’s condition / parent’s satisfaction with how the child achieves the goals | Every three months | “Invitation to a Dance”GMFCS“Play and interact”СОРМ |
| Goal attainment by category, depending on the child’s condition | Upon request (no sooner than every six months) | Manual analysis of the data collected earlier |
| Parents’ stress and support level | Every three months | “Primary Caregiver Stress Level”“Primary Caregiver Support Level” |
| Parents’ satisfaction with the program | Every six months | Self-designed anonymous form |
| Counselors’ satisfaction with their work | Every 12 months | Self-designed anonymous form |
| Personnel assessment and development system | Every 12 months | The system was designed by KPMG’s HR department |
Here are the conclusions we made by comparing the feedback from parents:
80% families get used to visit by a new specialist within a month.
80% of the respondents think that the counselor thoughtfully responds to the family’s needs.
85% of the respondents answered “Yes” or “Mostly yes” to the question, “Does the counselor clarify the home assignment, explaining the purpose of specific exercises?”
In October 2018, 82% of the respondents answered “Yes” or “Probably Yes” to the question, “Do you think it is easier for you to take care of your child now that you have joined the program?”
In October 2018, 78% of the respondents answered “Yes” or “Probably Yes” to the question, “Do you understand the needs and signals of your child better now?”
55% of the respondents are monitoring whether the targets have been achieved. (This indicator has been steadily growing from one poll to another.)
In October 2018, 91% of the respondents (as opposed to 87% in April 2018) said they saw connection between home assignments and the goals set. (A year ago, this indicator was much lower.)
Based on an internal study done in Q1 of 2018, 60% of the mothers said their stress level decreased after they joined the program. 70.5% said their support level increased.
Annual poll among the counselors regarding their satisfaction with the work shows that not all of them consider their compensation satisfactory, yet almost all of them said they appreciated being involved in an innovative project, lifelong learning, and solving complex task, which matters to them much more than monetary considerations.