Mom’s Belief will continue to offer customised care through evidence-based solutions that engage and equip parents with clinical guidance, training, mentoring and tailored resources. Nitin Bindlish, Founder, CEO, Mom’s Belief reveals more in an interaction with Prabhat Prakash
What are Mom’s Belief expansion goals for the next three years?
In the next three years, Mom’s Belief intends to provide support to at least 30,000 families with special needs children. We will achieve this by extending our reach across India through the organic growth of our Home Programme and by bringing more therapy centres into our partner network. We will also establish a presence in the Middle-East, starting with UAE, and in Southeast Asia, with Singapore as our point of entry.
Are there any tie-ups/partnerships with healthcare providers?
We partner with other healthcare providers and currently have eight partner centres in the NCR area. Through our partnerships, we enhance the therapy centres’ service offerings and the clinical skills of their professionals. We provide resources, and technical/operational support as well. In the coming weeks, we will be announcing a partnership with a few large and very well-respected healthcare providers. We are looking to have 150+ partners.
We also partner with mainstream schools to promote an inclusive environment that addresses the needs of students with mild to moderate developmental disorders, and we can also support special schools. Our aim in partnering with therapy centres and schools is to build an ecosystem of support that touches each facet of a child’s life.
How does Mom’s Belief differentiate itself from the competition?
There are therapy centres, NGOs and government bodies that assist children with developmental disorders. Yet there are no service providers in India that assign a dedicated child psychologist to each family to create a highly customised programme and deliver resources to homes, as we do.
Our Home Programme support begins with a neurodevelopmental profile of the child. It offers a very comprehensive look at the child’s skills, strengths and weaknesses and is used to create monthly individualised education plans (IEPs) for the child. The IEPs are created by the dedicated child psychologist and the parents, who work together to identify skills and strengths for further development. Once an IEP is in place, the psychologist customises teaching tools, activities, strategies and techniques for the parents to use. The psychologist connects with parents using commonly available technology platforms and the teaching tools are delivered to the home. This offers greater convenience for families and is especially helpful for families with limited access to professionals and resources.
In our first year, we delivered the Home Programme to families in 114 cities in India and to five international locations. We have helped over 1,400 families so far.
How much has the company grown since inception?
We are still quite young. Mom’s Belief was established in 2015, and we spent three years in R&D before launching our programmes. International experts were involved in the development of our model, and they are still engaged in delivering clinical workshops for our team of child psychologists/psychiatrists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, developmental paediatricians and special educators.
Our clinical leadership team has grown to include senior professionals with long-standing ties to Stanford University and AIIMS, Sir Ganga Ram, Max and VIMHANS Hospitals.
Our clinical team has grown substantially, from about 20 when we launched to 220 at present.
What is the global market size for autism management? How is Mom’s Belief going carve a niche for itself in the global market?
The global market size for autism management is significant and growing. cases of autism spectrum disorder are increasing around the world, partly due to increasing levels of awareness. In the last year, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder in the US rose from 1 in 68 children to 1 in 59.
Data published in the Global Burden of Disease report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation cited a prevalence of autism spectrum disorder ranging from .8 per cent to 1.1 per cent across countries (2016).
A global study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reported in 2018 that 52.9 children worldwide under the age of five had a developmental disorder. Of the 195 countries covered in the study, India had the highest number of children with developmental disorders.
Mom’s Belief will continue to offer customised care through evidence-based solutions that engage and equip parents with clinical guidance, training, mentoring and tailored resources. Parent empowerment is at the heart of everything we do, because parents are constant in their child’s life, and they know their child better than anyone else. Lasting progress can only be achieved if the child’s parents and other family members are involved, and Mom’s Belief gives parents the expertise, tools and the confidence to act as their child’s co-therapist.
Our parent empowerment model can be replicated in different environments. In fact, we were invited to the United Nations, Vienna Headquarters, in February to present our model as a Zero Project Award Winner. Mom’s Belief was identified as a scalable innovation that can eliminate the barriers faced by the disabled.
Are there any plans on tying up with the government?
We wanted to wait and reach a certain level before extending support for government initiatives. We feel we have the scale now to support and partner with government bodies, and we are open to any partnership that allows us to support a larger number of families.
prabhat.prakash@expressindia.com