Our outreach programme is the lifeblood of Malamulele Onward and serves as a window into how our offering translates at a service and community level. We recognise that training alone cannot achieve any significant impact and as a result, mentoring and support to rural CP services has become a vital part of our activities.

The programme serves to develop partnerships with rural CP services mainly through the courses that we offer. If a rural CP service has either parent facilitators or therapists that have been trained by Malamulele Onward, theybecome part of our outreach site network, where we conduct site visits to work with these therapists and parents in their own environment. Each outreach site is visited at least once a year, for a duration of two to five days at a time, by a team consisting of Malamulele Onward staff and volunteers.

The outreach visits allow us firstly to develop a deep understanding of the challenges faced by rural therapists and secondly, to partner with them in an effort to support and develop the service over time. During an outreach visit we provide the following services: clinical supervision to therapists; assistance with the implementation of a residential therapy programme; easing the implementation of the Carer-2-Carer Training Programme (where trained parent facilitators are involved); running workshops for therapists to further develop their clinical reasoning skills; exposure of new treatment strategies to therapists, such as group therapy; and assistance with providing essential equipment to children.

A valuable part of the outreach visit is the opportunity to visit and work with children in their homes. All children that attend our Residential Therapy Programme are visited in their homes during the course of an outreach visit, allowing us to monitor and evaluate the long-term impact that therapy and caregiver training has on the children we have worked with. This is how we come to understand “what works best” for children and families affected by CP.

Outreach sites