Abandoned Infants Assistance
Programs:
Providing Innovative Responses on Behalf of Infants and Young
Children (1995)
The infants and families served by AlA programs are among
the neediest clients in the health and human services systems,
beset by chemical addiction, HIV/AIDS, poverty, homelessness
or inadequate and unstable living arrangements. Infants exposed
to drugs and/or HIV in utero often need specialized health
care and therapeutic interventions to help them recover from
early physical and developmental traumas. Parents typically
need assistance with housing and transportation, health care,
drug and alcohol treatment, parenting and supportive therapeutic
services to help them address the day-to-day challenges of
their lives. The challenge for the AlA programs is substantial.
The programs must mobilize and coordinate a variety of services
from fragmented health and human services systems, and provide
those services to a client population which is wary of the
professional community and has little initial use for such
interventions. Based on interviews with AlA program directors
and staff and a review of program materials, strategies which
constitute the core of innovative AlA services with drug-exposed
and HIV/AIDS-affected families have been identified. These
include:
- Interagency collaboration to coordinate service development
and funding between multiple agencies serving the same population;
- Intervention teams which bring together professionals
from a variety of disciplines in the planning and delivery
of services;
- Peer services which use paraprofessionals from the community
to provide outreach, education, and supportive services;
- Home-based services which provide educational, supportive,
and therapeutic services in the home of the client;
- Culturally appropriate and women-focused services which
adapt therapeutic interventions to reflect the cultural
and ethnic influences in the lives of families and meet
the needs of women, particularly those with young children;
- Coordinated medical and social services case management
to reduce medically unnecessary hospital days and expedite
hospital discharges to the most family like settings; and
- Legal, policy and program development to promote permanency
for HIV-affected children and to help keep children orphaned
by AIDS from entering the child welfare system when other
resources can be identified.
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