For the past 59 years, HKSPC has been providing residential care services for young children, creating a safety net for those whose family is unable to provide appropriate and adequate care for them. Today, Children’s Residential Home (CRH) is the largest residential crèche for children up to 3 years of age in Hong Kong, offering round-the-clock residential care services to 104 children.
Thanks to the support of the Social Welfare Department, the Lotteries Fund and generous donors, CRH started a major renovation project in 2016 for two years to improve the living and education environment for children. It also launched a range of new initiatives to enhance its care services. On 4 December 2018, CRH held the “Joining hands for children’s better future” kick-off ceremony. We were honoured to have Mr Robin Hammond, Chairman of HKSPC’s Executive Committee, and Dr Law Chi-kwong, GBS, JP, Secretary for Labour and Welfare, to officiate the kick-off ceremony, as well as Mrs Susan Choy, HKSPC’s Director, to share on CRH’s new phase of development. After the ceremony, the guests enjoyed the children’s performance and toured around the Home to understand more about the services.
The past and present of Children’s Residential Home
CRH has reached a number of milestones in the past 59 years:
CRH’s old and new look
Comprehensive care, nurturing and support
Apart from daily care, CRH provides holistic educare services to foster healthy development of the children.
Designing care and nurturing objectives for children’s different phases
For young children aged 0-8 months, child carers focus on providing health care and helping them start a good habit; for 9-16 months, teaching them basic living skills; for 17-24 months, fostering their self-learning ability; and for those ages 2-3 years, inducing curiosity and sense of exploration in them.
Disease prevention and treatment
Many children at CRH are very weak, so we put a healthy living environment as priority. CRH staff adopt comprehensive measures on disease prevention and control on infection diseases to ensure children’s well-being.
Children’s healthy diet enhancement project
Designing menus with balanced diet and fostering healthy eating habit in children according to their developmental needs.
Benchmark infant care
Allowing staff with different working experience to understand the basic caring skills and requirement, so that children can receive appropriate care under a safe and comfortable environment.
Parental work
Collaborating with referring social workers and parents to formulate and continuously review children’s welfare, as well as providing support and education to family members to develop positive parent-child relationship and basic parenting skills.
Cross professional input
Continuously monitoring the growth and development of children and, when developmental delay is observed, seeking support from the professional team of nurses, social workers, clinical psychologists and therapists such as speech, occupational and physiotherapist.
Future development of the services at CRH
As the society faces increasingly complex family problems, CRH will actively develop the following aspects of work in coming years to meet new service needs:
- Comprehensive educare to enrich children’s learning opportunities and life experiences.
- Betterment of living and learning environment to create a home-like atmosphere and ease the manpower strain when taking care of a large number of young children.
- Enhancing parent work to establish trust relationship.
- Providing love and care for young children to fulfill their emotional needs and establish the sense of security and attachment bond in them, as well as managing parents’ emotion properly and coaching them for responsible parenthood.
- Enhancing professional support to provide early identification and training for children with developmental delay, and improving staff competence and administrative efficiency.
CRH’s services has always relied on the support from various parties. The kick-off ceremony is just the beginning and we are looking forward to collaborating with the government, corporates and individuals in future to provide even better resources to nurture the underprivileged young children. Your precious support will brighten up our children’s future.