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One of the recommendations of the Task Force on Youth Drug Abuse is to enhance parental education on drug prevention. To implement the recommendation, the Beat Drugs Fund has sponsored the production of a new anti-drug resource kit for parents, which was launched today (June 24).
The resource kit is jointly produced by the Department of Social Work and Social Administration of the University of Hong Kong and the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals CROSS Centre, in consultation with the Action Committee Against Narcotics and other stakeholders including parents and social workers.
Speaking at the briefing session on the resource kit, the Commissioner for Narcotics, Ms Sally Wong, said, ¡§Parents are important in the prevention of drug abuse and in helping children who have gone astray to reintegrate into the society. The new anti-drug resource kit for parents provides tips on parenting, attitudes and skills to prevent drug abuse by children of different backgrounds. The resource kit comes with a leaflet to help parents understand the key points and seek assistance.
¡§The resource kit also provides reference materials for other Government departments, parent-teacher associations, schools and non-governmental organisations to plan and organise anti-drug activities and modules for parents and train-the-trainers programmes.¡¨
The resource kit comprises four booklets. The first booklet introduces the rationale behind the design and the usage guidelines. The other three booklets set out a variety of anti-drug programmes targeting different types of parents, including parents whose children have no drugs related behaviour; parents with at-risk children and parents who have taken or are taking illicit drugs themselves.
Except for the first booklet, each booklet contains two sections. The first section proposes activities for parents to facilitate intervention at different levels. The activities are for individuals, small groups and large-scale events. For individuals, ¡§tips¡¨ in sample cases are used to introduce the skills for handling different scenarios. For small groups, detailed activities are proposed in a programme. ¡§Highly recommended activities¡¨ with key messages are highlighted to help users grasp the key points of the programme. The kit also highlights important learning and teaching points.
The kit contains a CD ROM in the second section. The CD ROM contains all the resources required for the activities such as information sheet, question cards, slides and record forms for small group activities.
The resource kit has been uploaded onto two websites (www.parentedu-fightdrug.org.hk and www.nd.gov.hk). Users can download the videos recommended for use in the activities and browse the latest anti-drug information.
Moreover, to help users with different needs to use the resource kit, detailed information on the resource kit training programmes and other anti-drug activities is provided on the website. Members of the public are welcome to join the programmes.
To further promote use of the resource kit, the Department of Social Work and Social Administration of the University of Hong Kong and the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals CROSS Centre will organise talks for parents and parent-teachers associations in 18 districts across the territory. They will also organise ¡§train-the-trainers¡¨ workshops for social workers, teachers and peer counsellors from July to October this year to encourage them to use the resource kit and organise more training programmes to promote the engagement of parents in the anti-drug cause.
Ends/Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Issued at HKT 18:34
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