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Child Care Pilot Projects Update
Pilot Project Update: Child Care Information Portal
For their pilot project, the Esquimalt Military Family Resource Centre (MFRC) is developing an online Child Care Information Portal. The pilot expands upon the capacity of the current www.familynavigator.ca website to include a child care section. The Portal provides comprehensive, community-specific information about available emergency, respite and casual child care services.
The Child Care Information Portal pilot will continue to run until February 2010. As the project progresses, Director Military Family Services (DMFS) and the Esquimalt MFRC are assessing the viability of expanding the Portal for national use.
New Pilot Project: Mandated Child Care Services Policy Enhancements
Though accessing child care can be a challenge for all Canadian families, the difficulties are heightened for Canadian Forces (CF) families experiencing unforeseen child care needs related to frequent postings, deployments, training cycles and irregular work hours. To mitigate the gaps between existing Military Family Services Program (MFSP) mandated child care services and the needs of CF families, enhancements have been proposed and are currently being tested in five CF communities: Cold Lake, Edmonton, Halifax, Petawawa, and Valcartier.
Each of these locations is piloting the enhancement of their Emergency Child Care and Emergency Respite Child Care services by expanding eligibility, and by offering more hours of care through the MFRC. A newly proposed mandated service, Casualty Support Child Care, is also being tested. Casualty Support Child Care will provide support to the families of CF personnel who are ill, injured or who have died while serving. Providing this kind of care is hoped to enhance the rehabilitative capacity of CF personnel, and relieve some of the burdens faced by grieving families.
To date, responses to the enhanced policies have been positive. This pilot project will continue until February 2010, at which point DMFS will fully assess the project’s success and the potential for these proposed enhancements to become national policies.
New Pilot Project: Enhanced Management Oversight of Child Care Services
Staff training and retention is a challenge for many child care centres in Canada. Finding the resources to train staff on the unique challenges of the military lifestyle can be even more taxing.
A new pilot project with the Trenton MFRC aims to enhance a child care centre’s management capabilities to improve the quality of child care services available to CF families. Trenton MFRC is documenting the type of business model required by CF child care centres to meet the unique demands of CF personnel with children. Additionally, professional development tools that train staff to better support CF families are being researched and evaluated.
The results so far are promising. While no two CF communities are completely alike, there are enough commonalities between locations to support the need for CF-tailored child care services. The development of the business model and training toolkit will be important first steps towards determining an appropriate CF family-centred child care model.
The results of these pilot projects will be included in DMFS’ comprehensive analysis of the proposed enhancements for the Military Family Services Program. Those projects that are selected to proceed will then be proposed for endorsement by Chief Military Personnel.
