Mr Henry Tang visited Heep Hong Society’s Wan Tsui Special Child Care Centre in Chai Wan on 25 October 2011. Accompanied by the Society’s Executive Committee Chairman Dr Henry Au-yeung and Assistant Director Mr Peter Au-yeung, Mr Tang met parents of children with special needs and our front-line staff in order to better understand their needs.
As at September 2011, more than 5,300 children were awaiting special child care services. The waiting time for a child to receive special care service could be from one year to as long as 32 months. Because of the long queue in the East Kowloon region, a mother whose daughter is suffering from cerebral palsy chose to travel with the child from their home in Tseung Kwan O to Chai Wan everyday for special training. The situation is echoed by a social worker who has been serving at Heep Hong for years. She urged the government to make a performance pledge for special child care service and reduce the waiting time to six months, and to have at least one social worker in each centre providing supporting services for parents.
The lack of resources from the government means limited provision in quality child care services. The current teacher-child ratio in special child care centres is one to six, and often parents would need to volunteer in taking care of their children in the centres which in turn adds pressure to their already-stressed out lives. Teachers also expressed their support in reducing the ratio to 1 teacher to 3 children so that they could spend more time on developing individualised education plans for each child.
A Heep Hong speech therapist voiced out that due to a lack of resources, the current service of providing a 30-minute training session every other week for each child is far below the standard of at least one 60-minute session a week for each child in some foreign countries. Furthermore, special needs children require various training and mobility equipment and aids which take up storage space. Assistant Director Mr Au-yeung urged for an increase of the physical space allocated for each child so that children could have more space for activities.
During the 90-minute visit, Mr Tang asked questions revolving around services for children with special needs and listened to needs of our parents and front-line staff. He responded that he would pay more concern about services in this area after the meaningful visit.
