The SBAHC Early Intervention Model: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities

Background: Early intervention plays a crucial role in maximizing the developmental outcomes of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Nevertheless, there is a lack of coordination between medical, surgical, rehabilitation, and social care systems with early intervention services in Saudi Arabia being fragmented. Objective: To describe and introduce the Early Intervention Model designed at Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City (SBAHC) as an interdisciplinary model of working with infants and toddlers with disabilities. Methods: This paper is a descriptive white paper describing the structure, components, and operational workflow of the SBAHC Early Intervention Model. This model coordinates medical, surgical, and rehabilitation care by integrating these services around a centralized early intervention program, allowing a quicker multidisciplinary evaluation and plan of care coordination in a single system. Results: The SBAHC model also offers an opportunity to access various clinical specialties in one sitting, facilitating early detection, comprehensive assessment, and individualized intervention pathways. These pathways lead to discharge children into normal developmental boundaries, multidisciplinary intervention in an intensive inpatient facility of complex cases and referring to home-based care programs to provide continuous monitoring and family-centered support. Conclusion: The SBAHC Early Intervention Model is a structured and possibly scalable model that can enhance the coordination of care and access to many services for infants and toddlers with disabilities. Nevertheless, being a conceptual and working model, it needs more empirical analysis to evaluate its efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and long-term outcomes.