Volunteer Position: Teenager-related Therapist

CONTACT DETAILS

Name of institution:    Green Pine Clinic

Key contact name        Ms Tran Thi Thu Ha – Host coordinator

Key contact tel. number (direct)        +84 24.3628.0350

Key contact tel. number (other)         +84 912 552 393

Email Address:                                        Hatran2004@gmail.com;   ha.tran@rtccd.org.vn

Address                                                     No 39, lane 255, Vong st, Dong Tam,

County/State/Province/Region          Hai Ba Trung dist, Ha Noi

Country                                                     Vietnam

OVERVIEW

The Green Pine Clinic (GPC) opened in April 2014. It is the first ever service to provide assessment and counseling on early childhood growth and development in Hanoi. It is developed based on the evidence from research findings in the last 15 years about the needs of young population and health system in Vietnam. It is a kind of primary health care facility.

The GPC focuses on:

• Providing assessment of children from 0 month to 5 years old and counselling. Services for children assessment include growth monitoring, physical health-check, nutrition intake analysis, eye and dental care, hearing testing, and motor/language/cognitive development. Its services include home-based visits (newborn), clinic-based assessment, counseling via direct visit and telephone;
• Offering therapy services to children with autism, ADHD, communication disorders, emotional disorders and development delays. Majority of its young clients are children aged 12 months – 6 years. Minority are primary-school children or teenagers who needs supports in psychological assessment and therapy regarding their relationships with peers and with parents;
• Conducting training classes to pregnant women and main caregivers on how to provide responsive care for child development, community-based first aid and early identification of children with development delays. The clinic also provides training kindergarten teachers about pre-school children care, first aid and psychological supports to children in needs.
• Providing psychological assessment and supports to pregnant and postpartum women. The clinic pays attentions to depression and anxiety among pregnant women and postpartum mothers and they provide therapy for these women in hope that their children will be benefited from better care from parents.

GPC is a model of social enterprise in healthcare. It collects fees from payable users in urban areas to cover the operational costs of the clinic and free services to the community. The clinic’s free services include assessment and therapy to women and children who are victims of domestic violence and trafficking and who currently live in shelters, and poor urban families (referred by local authorities and organizations). The clinic also provides free training to urban/rural kindergarten teachers, children and women in rural settings. In a month, the clinic provides about 2-4 training courses (both free and fee-based).

GPC is also a knowledge hub to the public. GPC doctors often have talks on the national television about child care or directly write articles to advise parents on responsive care.

80% of their clients are children under 5 years old, mainly using the first and the second services. The remaining 20% clients are children aged over 5 years old and women during pregnancy and after delivery.

Green Pine Clinic is a friendly setting. It is kindergarten-like decorated to support floor-time of children. Almost of all staff could speak English. Two doctors could speak French well. It is a keen-on-learning clinical setting.

The clinic website: http://www.phongkhamcaythongxanh.org.vn

However, most of the GPC’s website and Facebook info is in Vietnamese and updated daily, but the English page is not updated.

LOCATION

The Green Pine Clinic is located in 3 floors of a 7-storey building. It is about 7 km away from the Hanoi central business district.

KEY FACT

• The clinic has 11 staff (2 pediatricians, 2 pediatricians with expertise in psychology, 1 psychiatrist, 1 professional psychologist, 3 para-psychologists, 1 nurse and 1 receptionist)
• Vu Thuy Lan is the head of the clinic. She is a famous pediatrician in Vietnam and could speak both English and French.
• The clinic staff have good team work collaboration. Child assessment result is computerized into the customized software which is linked from the receptionist to doctor’s computer and psychology’s computers.
• There is about 20 children with psychological support need visiting the GPC daily and about 5-10 children-visits for the service type (1), including the sick children.

PROGRAM MISSION

The program aims to standardize the psychological assessment and therapy support for teenagers and school-age children.

The common issues that parents met with their teens at the clinic are: teen with easy irritation or angry; teen always have problems with peers and could not make any closed friend; teen refuses to join family event, school event, sport event and just love the bed; primary children often get unexplained complaint symptom when arrive the school gate but get OK when arrive home; teenager depression; teen withdrawal after parent’s divorce.

PROGRAM GOALS AND TASK LISTS

Identify gaps of the current practice

• Review the issues of teenagers in Vietnam. We would love to talk with you on Skype when you have decide to work with us so that you have a sense about it and decide the material or content will go with you to Vietnam.
• Work with local mental health team to identify the assessment tools they are using and therapy, reading material available and what they needs.
• Identify the topics to focus to share the experience with the local mental health team: topics, reading text, activities to engage to improve performance skills

Improve the assessment and therapy quality

• Directly meet with teenager and their family. The local doctors/psychologists will accompany you as the interpreter to learn.
• Internal meeting/seminar weekly to discuss cases and therapy guideline
• Observe (with support of independent interpreter) the assessment and therapy performed by the local doctors/psychologist and provide further guideline/support to improve the quality.
• Provide recommendation on instruments/books/infrastructure that should be bought/improved to standardize the counseling room that suitable for teenagers and their family

Improve public awareness of child and maternal mental health

• Talk to a group of mothers-fathers about teenager issues (select one topic) to raise public awareness about the issues (seminar size from 40 – 100 attendants).
• Develop articles to publish on website and Facebook about the mentioned issues.
• Give a talk in video clip (2-5 minutes/video) about each issues. The GPC will arrange media team to film the talk. The video will be uploaded to YouTube and website for public audients.

YOUR ROLES

• Train local psychologists of standard therapy, counseling, planning and reporting skills
• Support the local team with educational materials to enrich their understanding.
• Develop educational materials with the team to support teenagers and their family
• Work directly with teenagers and instruct their parents of approaches to support their children at home;
• Instruct the mental health team about therapies and tools to help the teenagers; and standard performance via direct discussion or seminars
• If you are comfortable with talking on the screen, they would love to discuss with you about producing video clip to instruct mothers and fathers how work with teenager at home, how to deal with teenager’s anger, how to talk so that teen listen to parents, how to encourage teen who refuse social events or any other event, but enjoying the bed; etc. The medic team will make series of video so that family who are in rural Vietnam and watch and practice with their children if there is not therapy services in the provinces.

WHAT SKILLS OR QUALIFICATIONS WOULD THE IDEAL VOLUNTEER SHOULD HAVE?

• Experienced psychologist with expertise in teenager issues
• Have clinical experiences in hospitals or clinics or community-based programs/projects: assessment, treatment and counseling their families

Note: Once you decide to work with the GPC, the host coordinator and the doctor supervisor will Skype with you or email you to discuss the work plan about months before your departure.

TYPICAL DAYS

• The volunteer can work at the GPC from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. She/he can work about 3-5 days per week. There is no fix schedule for a day. Most of their client admit to the clinic from 8.00 am – 11.00 am and from 14.30 – 17.00. Her/his working desk (on the 2^nd and 3^rd floor) will be closed to the MH team to ensure frequent discussions and information sharing.
• After the therapy session with the children and their parents/caregivers, doctors and the psychological team will sit down with the volunteer to discuss the case and how to help the children, plan of therapy.
• In every 1 or 2 weeks, there will be a seminar where the volunteer will share their experience of therapy in about 2 hours.
• The volunteer will have the free lunch with staff (the organization has a very good cook with diversified local food) from 12.00 – 13.30. It is the time where cultural values can be exchanged. If you like drinking water during meal, feel free to bring the water with you to the lunch room.
• From 13.30 – 14.00 the volunteer can join the Mindfulness session (sitting on Himalaya salt stone and practice meditation) or sometimes can go out with young staff for coffee.
• The local staff sometimes have outdoor activities and they often invite volunteer to join with them. It is a dynamic and friendly working environment.

The volunteer is encouraged to have the weekend off to explore Hanoi and Vietnam.

DRESS CODE

It is a comfortable working environment with a lot of activities on floor time (children play on floor, parents prefer sitting down on the carpet to discuss with psychologist and doctor while keeping an eye on their children rather than sitting on official chairs and table). You might run between the second and the third floor, depending child age, the assessment room will be different. So in short, dress and footwear is as your wish.

PROJECT STRUCTURE

One the first day, there will be the welcome meeting where the host coordinator, the clinic staff (1-2 key persons) will meet you, give you overview of the clinic, discuss of the work plan revision if any and make consensus activity outputs for your stay.

From the next days, you will work directly with the mental health team. A pediatrician with expertise in psychology as well will be your supervisor, coordinating the technical work with you. There will be daily interaction, with discussion and directly interaction with children. The local mental health team will ask you questions if they observe you-child interaction and they want to learn more the underlying reason why you do this or that with the child and how would you do to stimulate the child with difficulty in some specific circumstance.

When you are comfortable and the seminar content is well prepared by you, with your consent, they will arrange seminar so that you can talk to the whole team at the meeting room (PowerPoint presentation, plus step-based instruction, discussion). Each seminar is about 2 hours and you might conduct several seminars to complete a topic. The seminar is around 10.30 – 12.00 or 13.30 – 14.30. In the afternoon children often come busy by 14.30 – 17.00.  The local team prefer behavior-based instruction rather than PowerPoint only. They want learning to do things right, learning new things to help children more effectively.

The host coordinator will drop in weekly and talk to you to make sure if you are comfortable with the work and the team and see if there is any way she can do to help you feel more comfortable and the work in convenient environment.

Staff will come to you to talk about work and ask you about places in Vietnam that you have been to and food that you have tasted. They want to improve their English skill and explore if there is any kind of local food they can take you to taste when the working hour is finished. Feel free to talk with them at any time.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

The local team might ask you to support finding some materials to bring to Vietnam if you can access to those documents, i.e. WISC tool