Early-intervention centres, pre-schools looking at ways to ease long waiting lists

SINGAPORE — The waiting time for those wishing to join the AWWA’s Early Intervention Programme for Infants and Children (EIPIC) centre in Hougang is between a year and 16 months.

But with the expansion of the Hougang branch and opening of two new centres next year, AWWA education and development director J R Karthikeyan hopes that they can cater to up to 720 kids, and that the waiting time will drop to between nine months and a year.

However, because of manpower shortage in the sector, the AWWA, a voluntary welfare organisation (VWO), faces the challenge of recruiting trained staff to expand its early-intervention services, said Mr Karthikeyan.

For the two EIPIC centres in Clementi and Simei under the Autism Association (Singapore), the waiting time for a slot is between six and 12 months.

The association’s senior manager for programmes and services, Paula Teo, said the centres are already running at full capacity. She noted that staff generally stay between two and four years before taking off for further studies or joining other VWOs.

Senior teachers will be able to take on more children and more complex cases, said Ms Teo, who added that the association provides training opportunities and mentorship as among its staff-retention initiatives.

Pre-schools are also trying to ease the waiting list at EIPIC centres by providing early-intervention therapy services for children with mild developmental issues. The Development Support Programme, funded by the Ministry of Social and Family Development, was piloted in 2012 and aims to reach 2,000 children annually in mainstream preschools.

A spokesperson for PAP Community Foundation (PCF) said more than seven in 10 of its centres have the programme, with plans for expansion. The spokesperson said its teachers are trained to understand the different developmental needs of children. After it hired 20 learning-support educators to detect children with at-risk or mild development needs, there has been an increase of over 20 per cent of K1 and K2 kids placed under its Development Support Programme over the past year.

Another anchor operator, MY World Preschool, has around 5 per cent of its teachers trained in special needs. Its target is for every centre to have at least one special-needs teacher.

MY World’s head of operators, Chels Chung, recounted the case of a K1 pupil who was referred to doctors for official diagnosis after preschool teachers helped the child’s parents to observe her over a two-month period. Her teachers had alerted the student’s mother after noticing that she was not communicating and socialising with her peers.

Subsequently, both her teachers and parents noticed similar behaviourial traits displayed in school and at home, and the child was taken to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital for assessment. Currently, the preschool teachers and her parents are working with doctors to use the same intervention strategies in supporting the child.

While there are parents who are open to talking about their children’s development issues, there are also those who will need more time to come to terms with this, Ms Chung said.

“They might prefer a ‘wait and see’ approach as they feel their child’s condition will improve over time, or they are afraid of hurting the child’s feelings ... For us (teachers), we will make our observations and communicate with parents whenever they are ready to do so,” she added.