孙雪玲政务部长、蔡瑞隆高级政务次长答复议员黄玲玲：在全岛展开托婴服务试点，为人员提供培训

The Chairman: Minister of State Sun.

Ms Sun Xueling: I thank the Member for her questions. First and foremost, this is a pilot nationwide. So, we are not specific about where the pilot locations are. But that said, we are currently engaging operators. It depends on which operators see it as a viable business model and the operators may also have their own geographical focus areas. So, what I would like to say is that it is not intentional from MSF as to where the pilots would be. But depending on who are the operators who are interested in working with MSF on this, we could see a situation whereby we could start in certain locations first rather than others, but it is a function of which are the interested operators.

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Where fees are concerned, I shared that we aim to make parents' expenses for childminding services similar to what a medium-income family pays for infant care at Anchor Operators. So, the potential out-of-pocket expenses could be about $700 thereabouts. We just want to make sure that this is affordable and is seen as a flexible childminding option for parents.

The last question that she had was with regard to standards. I shared that we would have established processes for incident management because we understand from parents, that safety is very important to them should they wish to consider this option and we will also ensure that childminders undergo basic training in areas, such as basic infant care, first aid training, food safety and hygiene.

Mr Eric Chua: I thank Ms Ng for the clarifications she is making. Indeed, we do need the right type for a family coach and basically, we look for a few things.

One, is a person somebody who really is passionate and really genuine and authentic about helping people from lower-income families.

Two, somebody who can display empathy and have good, strong communication and interpersonal skills because that will be helpful when communicating some of the action plans or things that the families need to work on.

And three, really, individuals with good analytical planning, as well as problem-solving skills. So, we are also open to having mid-career switchers join us because we do understand that mid-career switchers, they have more working and family experience and a lot of time this will come in useful. Because we are talking about life experiences that the family coach could potentially share with the families that they work with.

But in addition to the type of candidates that we are looking for our family coaches, we also provide a comprehensive suite of training. There is a structured training programme for family coaches before they are deployed and at various milestone stages and this will include frameworks that they can use to assess the family's strengths and needs for action planning and also engagement-related training. So, things like basic counselling, motivational interviewing, cultural competency as well as coaching techniques; and also working effectively with stakeholders. Because it is not about just bringing a goodie bag or a bag of different schemes to the families. It is about connecting the family to other agencies, other organisations on the ground, so there needs to be a good sense of who these partners are going to be and a good team spirit or team player-ship, if you will, in working with the partners on the ground.

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