Our Objectives Chairman’s Statement: “To provide or assist in the provision of an adventure playground for children and young people, who have special needs and who are resident in South Staffordshire and the West Midlands, with the object of improving their conditions of life.” At it’s inception, the twentieth century was named, the century of the child. There was a vision at the beginning of the century that rapid advancement in all fields of scientific endeavour, particularly in the field of understanding disease processes, especially infectious causes of diseases, would lead to rapid elimination of the main causes of mortality and morbidity in childhood thereby ushering in a happier, healthier and more fruitful beginning of life for children. Although there have been immense advances in realising some of the goals of this vision, particularly in drastically reducing infant and early childhood mortality, the situation has been far less satisfactory in reducing morbidity, disadvantage, disability and handicaps in children. It can be argued that the social, emotional and psychological dislocations caused by the upheavals of the century and increasing breakdown in family structures have greatly increased these problems, the main burden of which has fallen on children. The situation has been doubly worse for children with special needs, be it physical, mental, emotional or social. The special needs adventure playground has been designed to fulfil, in a small way, one of the basic promises of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Kingdom on the 15th of January 1992, I.E., “That every child is entitled to rest and play and to join in a wide range of leisure, educational and developmental activities.”
Dr
S.K. Chakrabarti M.B.B.S. DCH., DA., MRCP |
