Diversity and full partnership in helping children and young people with multiple communicative disabilities and their communication partners

The most important factor in ensuring treatment success is tailoring the treatment to the individual. This can be a challenge when working with people from different cultural or sub-cultural backgrounds. The culture, environment and experience of the client is also known as the developmental niche, and knowledge of this is essential to treatment success. However, there is often a gap between the client’s developmental niche (different culture, different language, low literacy level) and that of the practitioner (white, highly educated).

This project aims to develop guidance for culturally sensitive assistance in supported communication interventions for children and young people with multiple communicative disabilities. The objective is to provide practitioners with tools that can help them to bridge the gap between the culture, environment and experience of the client, their communication partners and the practitioners themselves, and to help them to deliver each step of the care process in the most culturally sensitive way possible. Examples include a roadmap and providing sample questions or talking points. The guidance will take into account the practitioner’s own implicit biases. Recognising these biases is the first step in the bridging process mentioned above.

As such, the project focuses specifically on communicative treatment, since communication is obviously central to this and it puts relatively high demands on the communication partners, often the parents. We also specifically focus on parents who themselves do not have a good command of the Dutch language, have a (mild) intellectual disability, have low literacy levels or have a low socio-economic status. Parents play a central role in the implementation and success of an intervention, and equality and full partnership with all parents should be sought in the design and implementation of the communicative treatment.