A Scoping Review of Formal Care to Children with Special Needs during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The purpose of this scoping review was to investigate the research conducted during the Covid 19 pandemic on Formal Care (FC) to Children with Special Needs (CSNs), the challenges faced by FCP, understand the key concepts, and identify the research gap for achieving in-depth and broad results. This study adopted scoping review as a technique to map the relevant literature by searching electronic databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Research Gate and JSTOR.

The study designs were quantitative survey, qualitative case study, qualitative focus group study, and concurrent equal status fully mixed method. These articles discussed the pandemic-specific FC services for CSNs globally, in the United States of America (USA), Spain, Singapore, India, and South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The grey literature included a WHO document, government guidelines, master’s dissertation, webinar, magazine article, newspaper report, and a TV news report.

Subsequent stay-at-home orders marked a significant paradigm shift in delivering special needs child care globally. Disciplines caring CSNs developed home-centered programs and adopted online modalities for delivery. Parents became the key players in all services for CSNs. When paediatric rehabilitation in the developed countries completely transitioned to telehealth, institutional caregivers in Asian countries were exhausted with workload and distressed with multiple stressors. However, this scoping review illuminated many new avenues for research in the domain of formal care to special needs children in a pandemic context.