Queen Elizabeth II Family Centre
The Queen Elizabeth II Family Centre is a postnatal and early childhood primary health service for families with children up to three years of age. The Centre is staffed by an interdisciplinary team including nurses, midwives, mothercraft nurses, counsellor, community development officer, medical officer, and other health professionals visit and are referred to when required.
Criteria for admission to the Centre include:
- unsettled babies;
- complex lactation and other feeding problems;
- in-risk families;
- special needs families;
- mood disorders;
- parenting support & education;
- failure to thrive; &
- child behaviour difficulties.
As a public hospital a referral is required for admission.
Referrals are accepted from health professionals, child protection agencies
and other social service providers.
The residential service run at QEII provides an opportunity for you to work through primary health and child behavioural issues that are troubling you. It gives your family a chance to explore other options and try new strategies and modify your parenting and self care techniques to fit into your family's lifestyle. As we are all different and so are the solutions, though there are usually common threads and our professional team can work with you to explore and implement well researched and evidence based options that best suit your family.
The emphasis is on working in partnership so that you can find solutions to best suit you and your family. You will gain confidence in your own capacity to interpret and respond to your childs needs.
As well as working with you on a one to one basis, each day there is a parenting education group session on related issues that may include topics like sleeping, feeding, self care and child safety.
The program runs for 5 days/4 nights. When you arrive you will discuss with one of our child and family health experts what you hope to achieve during your stay and how to go about achieving this goal. Our staff will then support you and work with you.
Canberra Mothercraft Society
CMS started in 1926 in the nation's new capital, Canberra, and has a long history of identifying gaps in services for families of young children and establishing new services to meet those needs. Once established many of these new services have become organisations in their own right or run by the ACT Government. Since 1926 CMS has brought to the families of the ACT and surrounding region:
- Mothercraft Clinics;
- Home Help;
- Playgroups; &
- Occasional Care Centres.
Today CMS operates:
As times change, we change with them to meet the contemporary needs of families in the Capital Region. Increasingly we hacve adopted a community development approach and work in partnership with other agencies on programs like GrandParents ACT & Region, Relaxing Into Parenting and on the development of the Grandparents Stories. | 
