Cape Town - A new model of service provision could soon revolutionise the well-being of children in South Africa by making a whole range of services available in one place.
Although it is still in a very early phase of development, the “one child, one system” approach to service provision for children will be piloted in North West, after which it could be rolled out in other provinces, starting with KwaZulu-Natal.
According to project leader Sherri le Mottee from Ilifa Labantawana, an early childhood development programme, “The way things work in South Africa at the moment is that at a systems level, we separate all the needs of children.
“We see health, education and social development as separate entities, for example. Because of this, we don’t provide services in the same place. This is a complicated way of doing it and creates many barriers.”
She says her organisation is collaborating with different partners to see how one set of services can be accessible to each child so that, for example, their “nutritional needs, primary health-care issues, and appropriate stimulation critical for their development” can all be delivered in one locale.
And, she adds, her organisation is working with different components of government in North West, where clinics will be used as starting points to bring many different components of early childhood development into one space.
“We want to do this through appropriate staffing, and also by physically putting a container on the property. So, from the ground up, we want to build a cross-referral system and create joint service provision,” she says.
According to Gugu Xaba, national project manager of the Window of Opportunity Project at global health organisation Path, this approach would also improve the well-being of parents and caregivers.
“By making sure the child can get all the services in one place instead of multiple places, it will be of benefit to the parent or caregiver too. The more services available to parent and child in one space, the better,” she says, adding clinics are a valuable catchment site for single mothers who need to see to their needs and their children’s.
Anik Gevers, a senior researcher at the Medical Research Council, says there are several barriers to the physical and psychosocial needs of children being met in South Africa, but that the latter need more advocacy as they are not as widely understood.
“People might not know how important psychosocial needs are for children as they are not as immediately clear as the physical ones, but any centre that wants to offer a “one-stop” approach for children would need to integrate services that raise awareness of these needs rather than just focusing on the physical needs,” she explains.
She says parents in low-income settings are “eager for information and skills, and ideas that will help them raise their children and cope with the stress of parenting”, but that any integrated service provision should also be extended beyond early childhood development.
For Chandre Gould, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, the approach of seeing a child as a “whole person” as advocated by the integrated services model, is also an important way of preventing violence against children.
“We can’t even hope to imagine a society with lower levels of violence against children if we are simply carrying on putting our emphasis on dealing with violence once it has happened,” she points out.
“We have to start supporting parents and children all the way through with early interventions. A hungry child can’t cope at school. A child who is struggling at school and is also exposed to violence is at risk of lashing out and not forming healthy relationships. This is just one example.”
She says all the components of seeing to a child’s needs – whether social, psychological, or physical – are interlinked and can be improved exponentially if seen in this way.
Cape Times