The Prakash Center for Children is planned to be an integrated facility that combines on one campus a 50 bed hospital, a residential school for 500 children, and a state of the art research facility with an emphasis on neuroscience.
The objectives of the Prakash Center are:
- Treatment of >1000 children/year
- Education of >500 children/year in an integrated setting
- Training of >200 special-ed teachers/year to seed >100 school special-ed programs
- Research into causes and therapies
- Advocacy for children with disabilities
Operational Plans
The key operational principle for the Prakash Center for Children is ‘integration’. This principle manifests itself in two ways. First, the Center integrates the three components of treatment, education and research in one campus, to harvest the tremendous synergies that exist between them. Second, in order to maximally facilitate the integration of disabled children in mainstream society, the Center seeks to be a transition point, rather than a long-term destination.
Here is how the process works:
A network of satellite clinics, outreach teams and partner physicians identify children in need of treatment. These children are brought to the Prakash Center for medical care. Over the next few months after treatment, they are rehabilitated at the Center’s hospital to enable them to benefit maximally from the treatment. They are also given basic scholastic training so as to allow them to enter a mainstream school upon return to their hometown. Importantly, the school also trains teachers from the treated children’s villages/towns in special education techniques. This ensures that upon the child’s return, he/she will have a smooth transition into a local school.
Working in concert with the hospital and school, the Center’s research facility will undertake investigations of the epidemiology of disabilities and also how they affect the body and brain. This is of immense help in formulating new treatments and rehabilitation techniques. Children’s stays at the Center’s school permit careful follow-ups and systematic longitudinal studies of their rehabilitation.
In this way, the Center acts as an active engine of change. It identifies and heals the children, and gets them started on the path of building a productive, healthy life. With this foundation, children go back to their hometowns to merge into the milieu of mainstream society.
Location
A careful analysis of multiple factors points to the vicinity of Rishikesh in Uttaranchal as being a good location for the Prakash Centre. This places the Center in close proximity of the Gangetic plains, which constitute some of the most densely populated, but least developed regions of India. The nearness of New Delhi (~250 miles) simplifies infrastructure and travel related logistics. The political stability of Uttaranchal is an added plus.
What is unique about the Prakash Center
The Prakash Center’s strength and uniqueness lies in both its individual components and their integration.
Even considered separately, the planned pediatric hospital, the state of the art neuroscience research facility and the modern rehabilitation/scholastic skills school, would render the Prakash Center unique in India. But, what makes the Center truly unprecedented is the tight integration of these three components. This ensures that research assessments can be used optimally to select the best treatment plans for every child, studies of rapid learning and brain-reorganization can be undertaken immediately following treatment, customized rehabilitation and education programs can be devised for each child under guidance from the clinicians, and longitudinal follow-ups can be conducted while the child gains an education. For these reasons, integration is not merely desirable, it is an absolute necessity.
Such integration is unique not only for India, but also the rest of the world. The Prakash Center can be a path-blazer for other such initiatives across the globe.
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