Evaluation of the project for the motor rehabilitation of oncological children in Turin

Title UGI2 – Motor rehabilitation activities for paediatric cancer patients

Location Turin, Italie

Duration 2020-2022

Partners Associazione Genitori Italiani contro il tumore dei bambini ODV (UGI)

Funding Fondo di beneficenza ed opere di carattere sociale e culturale di Intesa Sanpaolo

 

Context

The UGIDUE structure has been built near the Regina Margherita children’s hospital in Turin in order to provide additional rehabilitation services to cancer patients (or ex-patients). If with Casa UGI the organisation aimed to create a welcoming place for patients and their families in the vicinity of the hospital, with the gymnasium a rehabilitation pole was created that represents one of the first opportunities since the onset of the disease for patients to carry out activities outside the hospital itself.

The project ‘UGI2 – Motor Re-education Activities for Paediatric Cancer Patients’ aims to provide the Association of Italian Parents Against Cancer ODV (UGI) with specialised human resources that can carry out psychomotor rehabilitation courses for off-therapy and in-therapy patients within the equipped structure of UGI2.

The project financed by the Fondo Beneficienza Intesa Sanpaolo made it possible to include two full-time human resources in the UGI staff, specifically: a neuropsychomotricity therapist and a physiotherapist. The work of the above-mentioned figures has also been supported with targeted activities carried out by a neuropsychologist, a speech therapist and an orthoptist according to the beneficiary’s needs.

 

General Objective

By means of the multidisciplinary team created, the project aims to offer the beneficiaries a complete and customised rehabilitation treatment with the aim of bridging as much as possible the different functions impaired by the disease and the course of treatment.  The M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit carried out the monitoring and final evaluation of the project.

 

Our contribution

To prove the evidence of the results of the initiative, UGI requested the M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit to carry out

– a monitoring process that: reconstructed the theory of change underlying the project action;  identified ad-hoc indicators and detailed the timeline of the intervention. In addition, the monitoring process aimed to verify, after 8 months of the project, the progress of the activities, the achievement of output indicators and the opinion of the project staff regarding the implementation of the intervention.

– a final evaluation to define what has been achieved at the end of 17 months, assessing the relevance, effectiveness and sustainability (OECD DAC, 2019) of the project action. For the final evaluation, ARCO researchers visited the UGIDUE facility involving project staff and relevant stakeholders in dividual interviews.

By working closely with the Inclusive Development, the evaluation team developed a questionnairebased on the ICF language to investigate the ability of the rehabilitation training to trigger the desired changes in the beneficiaries.

The International Classification of Functioning (ICF) is a classification that was developed in coherence with the bio-psycho-social approach to disability, which does not focuses only on people’s disability status, but also considers their functioning. For the WHO, functionings are the result of the interaction between a person’s health condition, his or her bodily structures and functions, but also the activities he or she performs, the life situations in which he or she is involved, the environmental factors surrounding him or her, and personal factors.

Going into a further degree of detail, the ICF provides up to four levels of detail through which an individual’s health condition can be precisely detailed. In the analysis carried out by ARCO, the method involved the first 2 levels of detail, as it was judged to be adequate for the needs of the study. The classifications used were selected by mutual agreement between the project team and the members of the evaluation team.

Read more on our M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit