REACH strives for better health with early intervention

Serghino René

In the fall of 2005, neonatologist Dr. Charles Anderson and his medical team decided to address the issues involving children born prematurely. They observed that while many services are available to assist families, timely identification and gaining access to those resources are often a challenge.

To bridge that gap, Anderson developed REACH (Resources, Education, Advocacy, Connections and Hope), a program with a mission of making early intervention and other appropriate resources more accessible. By helping parents identify concerns earlier, validating those concerns and advocating for services, Anderson said, REACH gives children a chance for a better outcome.

“To help put some of this into context,” Anderson said, “if a woman has a premature baby and can’t work, she will have time and a range of resources available to help her understand the development of her child. She will be more empowered and ready to advocate for her child when needed.”

But when the mother is someone who doesn’t have that time and freedom — like a young woman trying to get through school and juggle a job — the circumstances change.

“She endures the same challenges of any young mother, but when resources are not readily available to her, the outcomes her child may experience are drastically different,” Anderson said.

The first step is awareness. All too often, six months pass before a parent may notice development problems in their child. For minorities and people of low-income, that time window can be as long as two years and by then, it’s frequently too late. State-funded early intervention programs are only available to children up to the age of three. Missing the opportunity can result in an increased need for special education, which is even more costly.

“We often miss the opportunity to intervene with these children early,” said Anderson. “About 60 to 65 percent of people of color are in special education. This can be partially avoided if there is intervention when they are young.”

The program does not only focus on premature babies. It also includes healthy full-term babies who don’t have immediate medical concerns. The staff at REACH work with parents of those children and help them make the most out of that intervention, informing them on how to handle and monitor a child, as well as how to identify a problem early on.

“If you take a child who is two years old and they have the language skills of a one-year-old, it will be much harder to intervene when it should have been done when they were one or one and a half,” said Anderson.

Some of the solutions are simple. For babies to gain proper movement and muscle strength, for instance, parents are encouraged to spend time with their children on the floor.

While the program’s incentive sounds good as a whole, sufficient funding remains a question. In Massachusetts, there is a proposal now to cut $2 million from the estimated $8 million budget. This would cut early intervention services by nearly 25 percent.

Proposed budget cuts, coupled with limits on insurance coverage, appear to spell even tougher times ahead.

“We need to spend more if the demand for resources is going up,” said Anderson.

Qualification standards are expected to increase as well.

“[Presently], a two-year-old has to be functioning at less than [the level of] a year-and-a-half old child to receive intervention, a 25 percent delay,” said Anderson. “Now a 30 percent delay is being proposed. It’s going to costs a lot more and funding will be only available for only the most significantly delayed.”

This is a real concern for Anderson, who is looking to expand the program.

“We are trying to build and expand our process through software monitoring, so evaluations can be made without seeing the child,” he said.

For more information on REACH, visit their Web site at www.reachfoundation.net.