Study Finds That Local Intervention Programme Helping Children From Low-Income Families Has Positive Impact

By
Ashley Seek
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A community of people coming together to help is a beautiful thing.

We’ve covered before how one lady’s pop up grocery booths helped to reduce food wastage and help those who didn’t have enough.

The initiative was so successful it even received help from Our Singapore Fund.

Today, we take a look at another amazing local initiative. One aimed towards helping children from low-income families.

Study Finds That Local Intervention Programme Helping Children From Low-Income Families Has Positive Impact

We’re talking about the local intervention programme Circle of Care.

For a little background, the programme started around 2013.

Social workers, educators, therapists, health specialists and community partners come together to support pre-schoolers and primary school children from low-income families.

More details of what they do can be seen here, though we will list a few ways the programme helps:

  • primary school transition support
  • developing life skills
  • building better parent-child relationships

The results of the programme have been positive as well.

It has been reported that children who go through the programme’s community health screening and health education efforts show improvements in health-related aspects of life.

They were even able to better pay attention in class and independently participate in activities.

We all know how energetic kids can be sometimes.

These results came from a study launched in 2018 that screened 147 children under the Circle of Care programme and 304 of their peers from the same pre-schools.

Families Who Need More Help

We’re generally known for pretty good healthcare in Singapore.

With thanks to our nation’s amazing healthcare workers.

However, Dr Chong Shang Chee, the study’s principal investigator, said children from less fortunate backgrounds sometimes need more help.

The following was observed for these kids:

  • less quality sleep despite getting more than their peers
  • more screen time and less outdoor activity
  • poorer dental health
  • unhealthier eating habits

These were also the concerns parents of said children often relayed.

In the case where health issues were found during a screening, there were also fewer referral follow-ups for these families.

Sometimes this was due to parents being uncontactable, thinking it was unnecessary or that their child was alright.

The study saw that among the 76.2 per cent of children having issues, only 63.6 per cent followed through for polyclinic referrals, 40.4 per cent for child development referrals, 11.8 per cent for dental referrals and 15 per cent for special medical needs.

With the results generally positive, Dr Chong felt that the programme has allowed for better outreach towards these less privileged children.

Circle of Care aims to reach out to 30 preschools and 7 primary schools by 2023.

Feature Image: CircleofCare

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Ashley Seek
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