I WAS glad to learn that Operation Santa is helping to raise funds for the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children (South China Morning Post, December 12).
Subsidies provided by the Government for the many agencies such as the HKSPC, which runs the 355 child care centres in Hong Kong, are inadequate.
However, I was concerned to read in the same story in the Post, about the case of Madam Yeung Wun Lai-hung who has three children under the age of six, one with cancer.
Any competent social worker aware of a child's essential needs could have helped the mother to have home help and home nursing to enable her to care for the three children.
Together with any necessary day child care arrangements etc, it would have been possible to avoid the institutionalisation of the infant baby in a residential creche.
It surprises me greatly, in this day and age in prosperous Hong Kong, that infants could be deprived of continuous parental and family care in this way.