Recently, Huaihua Comprehensive Early Childhood Care Center built by the Huaihua Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital welcomed its first group of infants and toddlers. As Huaihua’s first public childcare facility, its operation marks a new stage in the city’s early childhood care system.
The director of the center is an associate chief physician from the Child Healthcare Department of the Huaihua Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital. The center integrates medical and healthcare resources with infant and toddler care services, providing parents with a reassuring, professional, and scientific childcare option.
According to the director, as an important agency for the municipal maternity and child healthcare hospital to extend services covering the entire life cycle of children, the center breaks through the traditional childcare model and has created five exclusive characteristic services, providing all-dimensional protection for the growth of infants and toddlers from physical care to psychological development.
“We implement one-on-one personalized care based on each child’s temperament. In the initial stage of admission, a professional temperament assessment is conducted for every infant or toddler. According to different temperament types, personalized daily care plans are formulated,” Jiang Dan, director of the center, told the reporter. “For example, for infants and toddlers who are emotionally sensitive, caregivers will increase the frequency of companionship and interaction; for those with slower motor development, targeted sensory integration training will be designed to make the care more precise and considerate.”
The integration of medical-grade healthcare into daily care is a distinctive feature of this center. The center incorporates infant and toddler massage and healthcare foot baths into its daily basic care procedures. These services are operated by professionally trained caregivers. Gentle massage promotes blood circulation and enhances limb coordination of infants and toddlers; traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) healthcare foot bath packs are prepared according to the physical conditions of infants and toddlers to help regulate their physical fitness and improve immunity. Pilot data before the official operation show that infants and toddlers who received such healthcare services have a low incidence of diseases, and none of them take leave due to illness.
The center also organizes a multi-disciplinary team consisting of healthcare doctors, TCM pediatricians, and nutritionists to customize nutritional meal plans. Combined with the characteristics of local ingredients in Huaihua, nutritionally quantified meal plans are formulated. These plans not only ensure that daily nutrients such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates meet the standards but also integrate the TCM concept of food as medicine. All these measures ensure that infants and toddlers eat healthily.
Relying on the medical resources of the municipal maternity and child healthcare hospital, the center regularly invites ophthalmologists, stomatologists, ENT doctors, and TCM doctors to carry out health popularization activities. Ophthalmologists teach infants and toddlers to use their eyes correctly; stomatologists demonstrate tooth-brushing steps with models to cultivate oral hygiene habits; TCM doctors guide infants and toddlers to recognize common Chinese herbal medicines through olfactory and tactile experiences, helping TCM culture take root in their hearts from an early age.
The center has designed three categories of activities, namely situational games, interactive games, and exploratory games, which are based on the developmental needs of infants and toddlers in various domains such as language, cognition, social interaction, and movement, as well as their psychological and behavioral characteristics.
“For example, language expression ability is improved through picture book role-playing, logical thinking is exercised through building block construction, and social awareness is cultivated through group cooperative games. All these enable infants and toddlers to grow naturally in games, avoiding mechanical early education training,” a worker of the center explained.
It is learned that to meet the diverse needs of infants and toddlers of different ages, the center currently has three types of classes: the senior nursery class (2-3 years), the junior nursery class (1-2 years), and the infant class (6-12 months), all of which adopt the small-class management model.
(Translated by Yang Hong)