Evaluation of the Services Provided to Children With Cerebral Palsy From the Guardians’ Perspective

Abstract

The present study aims to evaluate the reality of the services provided to children with cerebral palsy from the guardians’ perspective and its relation to some relevant variables (i.e. branch of the association, educational level of the parents, monthly income, and number of years for receiving the associations’ services). The study was applied to the families of children with cerebral palsy in (10) centers of the Association of Disabled Children in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, a tool for data collection was prepared and verified for validity and reliability. It comprised (47) items distributed to (6) domains. The results showed that the arithmetic means of the domains ranged from (0.65) to (0.84). While “the performance of the administration and staff” was ranked first with an arithmetic mean of (0.84), “the supporting services” domain was ranked last with an arithmetic mean of (0.65), and the tool’s arithmetic mean was (0.71). Additionally, there are no statistically significant differences for (the academic qualification of the father, academic qualification of the mother, average monthly income, and number of years for receiving the associations’ services) variables. The study concluded that there is an urgent need to improve the services provided to children with cerebral palsy in all domains, especially in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia.