Epworth’s two core PROGRAMMES are:

RESIDENTIAL CARE

Each year, up to 90 children, aged four to 18 years, are cared for in Epworth’s residential care programme. The number in children fluctuates according to need and to numbers of children reunited with their families or placed in foster care. The children in the programme have been referred by the courts and have been abandoned, abused and neglected. Several children have chronic illnesses such as HIV, some have substance abuse problems, while others have intellectual or physical disabilities.

The residential facility aims to provide short-term care to children in need of care and who have been placed at the home by the courts. There is an emphasis on therapeutic intervention to restore individual and family functioning, with the aim of reuniting children with their families within a period of two years or to place them in foster care. If it is not possible to reunite children or place children in foster care, they are placed in the Independent Living Centre (see below) and stay at the home until adulthood.

The Residential Care programme comprises the following services:

Assessments and Therapy

Through the Therapeutic Treatment Centre, assessments, therapy and family preservation services are provided to children in residential care, as well as their families. A team of psychologists, educational psychologists and an occupational therapist provide these services.

Family Reunification

Epworth’s main aim is to reunite children with their families and to preserve families. Hence family reunification is a significant part of the Residential Care programme. In order to reunite a child staying at Epworth with his/her family, an interview and assessment is done with the child and the family. Following the assessment, a care and treatment plan is developed which includes input from all the therapists, the child and his/her family (where possible). Initially the child remains at Epworth and his/her family come to Epworth for therapeutic treatment. If certain criteria are met and the therapists are confident that the family will cope, the child is placed back with the family in their home. For six months to two years after the reunification, the family is visited and supported by Epworth staff.

The child and his/her family continue to receive therapeutic treatment during this follow-up period, and the child’s place at the home is kept open until the therapists are happy that the child is successfully integrated into his/her family. This is a long-term, intensive programme. The reunification process is thorough in order to ensure its success, and a family reunification can take up to three years. The duration of the reunification process depends on each individual case, for example a young person with a substance abuse problem may take longer to reunite with his/her family.

The Independent Living Centre

This centre provides long-term residential care to children who cannot be reunited with their families or placed within the extended family network or foster care. This programme focuses on providing children with life skills, education, and training in preparation for independent living. The centre supports young people until their 18^th year. However, they may stay longer if need be.

The Residential Treatment House

The residential treatment house offers a short-term crisis intervention to families in crisis. The whole family occupies the house together with the child at risk. Intensive therapeutic interventions are offered to these families in order to help them stay together. This process takes between six months to one year. The success of this programme lies in the early identification of a crisis and immediate intervention.

The Early Learning Development Programme

This programme pays special attention to children in Epworth’s residential care who are developmentally delayed either due to their HIV positive status or past trauma. The therapy team develops a programme for each child in order to help him/her reach his/her developmental milestones, in order to reduce the risk of a disability or failure at school. The therapists maintain close contact with the child’s teachers so that the teachers can reinforce the programme developed for the child in the classroom.

THERAPEUTIC TREATMENT CENTRE

The core objective of the Therapeutic Treatment Centre is family preservation: to keep families together and prevent children from being placed in children’s homes. The Therapeutic Treatment Centre provides services to children in residential care and their families; as well as to outside families in crisis referred by other NGOs, welfare services and schools.

The centre consists of two units: one unit is home to occupational therapy; while the second unit is home to psychological services, including educational psychology services. The centre makes use of psychology interns and provides training and supervision to them.

The Therapeutic Treatment Centre provides assessments, therapy and family preservation services to children and families in need of support. Each child and family receives a personalised multi-disciplinary treatment plan in order to ensure the success of the intervention. A team of educational psychologists and occupational therapists provide these services. Parenting workshops are also offered.

In addition to the services offered at Epworth Village, the Treatment Centre also offers educational psychology services to schools in Ekhuruleni. One of the educational psychologists or interns spends one day per week a school and provides assessment services, counseling interventions, and referral services. There is a great demand for this kind of service, and there are plans in place to extend this service in the future.

Another outreach initiative of the Treatment Centre is an assessment service offered at Bredell Caravan Park. This is done in conjunction with services offered at the caravan park by the CMR and the SAPS.