The Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday expanded subsidies for the nation’s 75 child development centers, as the number of children with delayed development has nearly doubled in the past decade.
The nation had 52 such centers last year, which provided assessment services for about 18,000 children, Health Promotion Administration (HPA) Director-General Wu Chao-chun (吳昭軍) told a news conference in Taipei.
With the rise in suspected cases of developmental delays, the centers would be short on funds, hence the increase in the subsidies and the number of centers, Wu said.
Photo: Chiu Chih-jou, Taipei Times
The additional centers are expected to expand capacity for assessment services to more than 30,000 children, he said.
Chen Hui-ju (陳慧如), director of MacKay Memorial Hospital’s Preventive Care Assessment Center, said that child development varies from individual to individual, requiring cross-specialty professional assessments.
Parents could follow suggestions listed in children’s health manuals and fill out the form in the manual, which would help parents identify signs of developmental delay and take preventive measures, Chen said.
Preventive measures would allow doctors to be more informed in conducting assessments, and arranging appropriate care, she said.
Taiwanese Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry president Chou Wen-chun (周文君) said that mental development issues could have a physical cause, while other reasons, such as autism, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, or abuse and neglect, were also common.
These make it difficult to analyze and arrive at the cause through medical examinations, and can only be carefully observed through children’s actions, their interactions with family, or through scale measurements and daily-life recordings, Chou said.
The HPA said that professionals from pediatric neurology, pediatric medicine, child and adolescent psychology, and physical therapy and rehabilitation departments would be paired with assessors from among clinical psychiatrists, language therapists, occupational therapists, social workers and audiologists at the centers.
The assessments would be one-on-one and the centers would provide follow-up suggestions for medication.
The HPA said that it intends to achieve 100 percent assessment center coverage for outlying islands and other remote areas.
It would fully subsidize travel expenses for people from outlying islands or mountainous areas who need to visit assessment centers, it added.
The program hopes to remove as many obstacles as possible for people to visit the centers, the HPA said.
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