17 years of Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) in Ukraine: the main principles

The changes happening right now in the field of care for people with disabilities in Ukraine, especially inside those terrible institutions, the internats, are moving fast, and it’s genuinely moving to witness: seeing this pace of transformation makes you want to help even more.

SOFT tulip’s visit to Ukraine in June 2026 carried special significance: marking 17 years of SOFT tulip in Ukraine. For Eric Bloemkolk, who made his very first visit back in 2006 to lay those foundations, it was an important milestone. Two decades later, he is still working alongside some of the very same people he met on that first trip.

Over the years, he has returned to Ukraine more than 100 times — maybe 150, he admits he has lost count. Before the pandemic, before 2020, he was traveling there eight or nine times a year.

So when he talks about getting to celebrate not just an anniversary, but the real changes achieved over these 17 years, there’s something in it beyond professional pride.

About Eric Bloemkolk

Eric is an Adviser and Project Leader at SOFT Tulip / Healthcare4Ukraine, his areas of specialization include inclusion of people with disabilities, deinstitutionalisation, early childhood intervention, international development, and lobbying & advocacy — both as a trainer and an adviser.

His regional expertise spans the Netherlands, Latin America (including Surinam), Kenya, and Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Ukraine.

Setting up Early Childhood Intervention is genuinely one of our biggest successes in Ukraine. It’s rooted in my confrontation with the internat system back in 2006, when I visited a few Soviet-era state institutions — and later, many, many more. The situation was so horrific that we decided on a two-track response.

Track 1: Emergency humanitarian improvement inside the internats

The first track was training — getting access to the internats and training staff to better care for the children. The staff was often completely unskilled and unprepared to work with severely disabled children. There was terrible malnutrition; children were dying. We worked to eradicate malnutrition across Ukraine’s internats as a pilot, and the solutions we developed were later adopted by the Ministry of Social Policy and implemented nationwide for all children in the internats.

Track 2: Preventing children from entering the system at all

The second track came from personal experience: my own firstborn son by birth had fairly severe brain damage. We went through a difficult process, but with good professional support as parents, he developed perfectly — no problems at all later in life. I had already experienced early childhood intervention here in the Netherlands, and the idea was: how do we stop at least the youngest children from ever entering this horrific institutional system?

The key was making sure parents would no longer give away their child — that parents feel empowered to care for their child themselves. This was effectively part of deinstitutionalization: preventing children from entering the system in the first place.

Early Childhood Intervention is fundamentally about empowering parents, not treating the child. It’s not about bringing a child to a physical therapist who works with the child alone — it’s family-centered, not center-centered: work happens at home, with parents, and parents decide what matters most in their own daily lives with their child. It’s usually about very basic things — feeding, sleeping, communication, sitting, play — but applied 24/7 in daily life, not for just one hour with a specialist in a center.

Why the first three years matter so much

In the first three years of life, the brain develops explosively — roughly 90% of its connections are already formed during this window. This means you can actually help prevent disabilities from developing by stimulating good brain connections early. That means fewer problems later — sometimes none at all. It’s genuinely preventive, and it also lays the groundwork for inclusive education: children have a much better chance of entering a regular kindergarten and school at age four.

How Early Childhood Intervention actually works — the core principles

Drawing together what’s described above, the model rests on a small set of clear principles:

1. Family-centered, not child-centered. The work isn’t done to the child by a specialist — it’s done with the parents, at home. Parents are the ones who decide what matters most in their daily life with the child.
2. Home-based, not center-based. Instead of bringing the child to a physical therapist for an hour and sending them home, the professional works in the family’s own environment.
3. Parents are empowered, not bypassed. The core mechanism isn’t treating the child directly — it’s building the parents’ own capability and confidence to support their child’s development themselves.
4. Applied 24/7, not once a week. The focus is on ordinary, everyday moments — feeding, sleep, communication, sitting, play — because that’s when development actually happens, not just during a scheduled session.
5. Targets the first three years specifically. This is the window when roughly 90% of brain connections form, making it the highest-leverage period for prevention, not just treatment.
6. Preventive, not only remedial. Done well, Early Childhood Intervention can prevent some disabilities from developing at all, or significantly reduce their severity — rather than only managing problems after they’ve become entrenched.
7. Interdisciplinary by design. Teams bring together different specialists (medical and social professionals) around a single family, rather than routing the family through separate, disconnected services.
8. A deinstitutionalization tool, not just a therapy service. By supporting parents early and well, ECI reduces the number of children who ever enter institutional care in the first place — it’s prevention at the level of the whole system, not only the individual child.

This idea of empowering parents works so well, and is now so widely recognized, that after extensive lobbying and advocacy in Kyiv — with UNICEF, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Policy, and the Ministry of Education — the Ukrainian government has embraced it step by step.

• Started with: 1 team
• Now: over 160 trained early intervention teams (approaching 180), active across 16 regions of Ukraine
• A National Association of Early Intervention now exists, with over 130 professional members working in the field.

The war made this even more urgent

Having a child with severe problems is high stress for any parent, anywhere in the world, regardless of wealth — I went through that myself. Previously, there was no support at all in Ukraine for these children and parents. Now, ECI teams (which are interdisciplinary — different specialists working together with one family) provide professional guidance on feeding, playing, communication, sleep, and daily care.

On top of the ordinary stress of raising a child with developmental needs, Ukrainian parents now also carry the daily stress of the war itself: a father at the front, possibly wounded, missing, or killed; family members who are internally displaced or living abroad. This is compounding stress, and parents are genuinely exhausted, facing serious mental strain.

The support from early intervention professionals is therefore crucial not only for the child’s development, but for the parents’ own mental health and their sense of being empowered to properly care for their child. Field reports include many calls from parents describing just how important this service has been to them during the war.

This impact is now reflected at the national policy level too: just a few months ago (around the end of last year), the Ministry of Social Policy approved a budget so that social professionals on early intervention teams (and in some cases the medical professionals working alongside them) can have their salaries covered directly from the state budget — a major breakthrough.