JLF recently awarded a grant of £221,196 to the Autism Child and Family Lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) to roll out a new programme to support the families of autistic children and young people in Israel over 3 years. This is a direct extension and broadening of the pilot work funded by JLF’s original grant awarded in January 2019.
The initial project examined the efficacy of a community-implemented, parent-mediated intervention (PMI) delivered to small groups of Jewish and Arab parents of children with autism and disruptive behavior. This pilot has shown the intervention to be effective and the current project focuses on creating a sustainable community-based treatment model.
The team will work with community service providers to disseminate the intervention in the public sector in a sustainable fashion. To do this, they will develop a novel mobile application, allowing families and clinicians to record the impact of the intervention on the families over time, enabling the team to monitor and improve the service over the next 3 years. The programme is designed so that clinicians in partner sites around the country will be able to continue delivering the intervention and utilising the accompanying application independently upon conclusion of the project.
With the advent of the pandemic, our team shifted the intervention online, which was possible thanks to additional support provided by JLF. Feedback from clinicians and families indicates that virtual delivery is different, not less. In fact, it has broadened our reach and we are able to offer treatment to families from the northernmost parts of Israel down to the Negev Desert in the South – Dr Judah Koller, Assistant Professor, Clinical Child Psychology and Special Education, Director, Autism Child and Family Lab at HUJI.
For more information about the Autism Child and Family Lab click here