From Hospital to Home: Using Early Visual Functioning to Support Families

Anchor Center for Blind Children, a non-profit organization that supports families with young children with visual impairment from birth to six, and a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children are collaborating to identify visual function concerns of pre-term infants and follow through with ophthalmological services to families and early intervention.

After the initial pre-term assessment in the NICU, infants that do not pass the NAVEG screening receive follow-up ophthalmological visits at six months and again at one year.

For infants identified with visual concerns, early intervention professionals and caregivers will work together to develop targeted parent education and strategies through routine-based environmental adaptations in natural environments. Research-based protocols and collaborative strategies using assessments and interventions will be collected over the next year to provide evidence of the caregiver’s interactions with the infant to (a) build functional visual behaviors, and (b) explore specific CVI characteristics.

In this presentation, Dr. Catherine Smyth, Director of Research at Anchor Center for Blind Children, will describe the project, and report on their current findings

This is a web-based, self-guided professional development activity for TVIs, VRTs, O&Ms, Parents, Teachers of the Deafblind or Severely Impaired, and Rehabilitation Specialists.