Uma Thambidurai, is a UK-registered nurse, midwife and lactation consultant. She is married to Gilbert and has two children, aged 18 and 15.

Always passionate about working with women and children, Uma specialised in midwifery as soon as she had completed her training at a London teaching hospital in the mid-seventies. After six years in England, she returned to her native Malaysia where she continued to work as a midwife in maternal and child health centres.

Some years later, toddler in tow, Uma and her husband immigrated to Australia, where she spent eight years in the busy maternity unit at St Vincent Hospital, Melbourne. After the birth of their second child, the family moved to Indonesia where Uma, unable to work in an official capacity, continued to care for mothers and children on a voluntary basis.

Towards the end of the nineties, the family relocated yet again – this time to Singapore, and Uma was offered a position at Thomson Medical Centre, initially as a midwife, and later as a lactation consultant within the hospital’s Parent Craft Centre. Always keen to build on her skills, she recently trained as an infant massage instructor.

At the beginning of 2006, Uma was presented with the wonderful opportunity of taking over the highly regarded Mother and Child Centre at Tanglin Mall. No stranger to the Centre, Uma had already established a good working relationship with many members of the team during her time at Thomson and had in fact regularly recommended Mother and Child to many of her former patients!

As the owner/manager of Mother and Child, Uma aims to enhance its current good reputation by offering several new services. She would like to increase the home visit services because, in her experience, couples who go home with a new baby need a lot of support with breast-feeding and parenting. Uma will also be available at the centre for in-house breast-feeding information and advice. Breast-pumps are now available for purchase and for hire.

New Saturday classes for fathers and babies are in the pipeline and opening Singapore’s first “The Baby Café” is another exciting new proposal. This one is still in the planning stages - so – more news soon. Uma intends to maintain the reputation of Mother and Child as a centre with quality services provided by a team of caring and compassionate health professionals. Mothers should feel free to drop in for a friendly chat and a cuppa, confident in the knowledge that they are being offered professional advice to help them make informed choices.

Our key role is promotion of health and prevention of illness. The health of children aged 0-5 is an important priority in our training and work. A Health Visitor is a qualified and registered nurse or midwife who has undertaken further (post registration) training to specialise in primary healthcare. At Mother and Child, we work with mothers of young babies – advising on such areas as feeding, safety, physical and emotional development and other aspects of health and childcare.

Health Visitors staff the Well Baby Clinic, provide weighing and measuring, and help with common problems such as feeding and settling. Centile charts from the UK are used to assess the growth of both breast-fed and bottle-fed babies until the age of one year. The same scales are used each time and babies are weighed unclothed to ensure accuracy. Lactation consultants can provide expert assistance with feeding problems. Information and advice on parenting issues such as sleep management, eating concerns and other minor ailments can be discussed individually.

Developmental Assessment of young children is available by appointment. Diane, Helen and Anna, have reviewed the developmental assessment schedules and in line with current practice, we recommend your child be assessed at the following key ages: 8 to 9 months, 18 months to 2 years and 3 to 3.5 years. These are generally one-hour long appointments.

We also help to develop the classes and courses for parents and parents-to-be. We provide well researched information on parenting, child and maternal health, nutrition and child development.

We have an eclectic team with the training and experience to provide a comprehensive service.

Sue Huxley came to Singapore for 2 years and nearly eight years later they are still here. “They” include husband and two of three children; Nicole 16 and Christopher 9. Their eldest, Sarah, is back in Sydney at university.

Sue has seen many changes occur during her time in Singapore. There are many, more coffee shops, more of those comfort foods from home, a new library, an entertainment centre, cash cards and the ERP to name a few!

There have been many changes at Mother and Child too. When Sue started in 1999, it was a small office in the Forum and was run by its founder Glenys Quayle. Sue was employed for 3 hours a week to teach child birth (antenatal) classes. The centre grew and moved to Tanglin Mall. Many wonderful midwives, health visitors and management staff have come and gone during that time - all part of the continual flow of Singapore expat life.

Sue still teaches antenatal classes but is also an accredited Lactation Consultant and does home visits to help with breastfeeding, she facilitates New Mother’s Get Togethers and in more recent years she started working as a Doula (labour support). She feels she has the best job in the world.

She enjoys meeting interesting people from all over the world, working with a great team of caring professionals and having flexibility and job satisfaction is an added bonus.

Helen Northmore is a qualified Health Visitor, Registered Nurse and Practice Nurse who has practiced in the UK and Singapore and is experienced at working with a wide and diverse client base.
Helen moved to Singapore in 2001 and started work at the Mother and Child Centre after attending as a client with her first baby. When she is not at work, she can usually be found running around after her three boys, aged one, three and five.

She trained at the University of Manchester in the UK and went on to work in Central Manchester for eight years before moving to Hong Kong with a brief stint as an English Language teacher.

Diane Cronly is a Health Visitor, originally from UK. She started nursing life as a general nurse and then did the midwifery certificate so that she could travel DownUnder. In fact, she loved the profession so much she never went back to general nursing. While working in Sydney for three years she met and married a native of sunny Blakehurst (South Sydney) and then they moved on to Vancouver in Canada for three years.

Diane returned home to the UK to try practical experience in midwifery. She gave birth to her three babies by three different obstetric methods: section, forceps and finally the normal delivery. All boys were in the 10-pound range!

She spent twelve years as a community midwife in one of the first midwifery led units in the UK. In the Millennium year during a midlife watershed, she decided to undertake a public health degree and become a health visitor. She then left her legacy of the tenth baby café, set up to assist mothers' breastfeeding. Perhaps there will be one in Singapore in the near future!

When Diane moved to Singapore, she thought it could be her early retirement and the start of a golf career. Then she found she had moved into an apartment opposite Mother & Child and after years of travelling on congested roads to go to work - being able to walk across the road to work was just too tempting.

Anna Scott is one of the new recruits to Mother and Child. She trained as a Health Visitor in the UK and worked in both the UK and Australia before moving to Singapore in July 2005. She is married with two young children aged two and four. Outside of work, she can be seen chasing my kids around the botanical gardens or going shoe shopping on Orchard.

Sue Styles has been living in Singapore for 5.5 years and delivered both her daughters, Holly (4) and Julia (2) at Gleneagles Hospital where she worked in the ITU for a short time. Her nursing background is in intensive care and coronary care and she nursed in Indonesia last year after the Tsunami.

Sue loves Singapore and is enjoying motherhood here. Her goal at Mother and Child is to teach the invaluable skill of baby and child resuscitation to as many people as possible.

There’s some good news and - some food for thought!

Dog people are said to possess the best traits of human nature:
They are liked and trusted by others because they are able to keep secrets. They have great listening skills (but not just yet), are loyal, honest, have a strong sense of justice and fair play and make good leaders.
They sometimes tell “white lies” to smooth difficult situations and will often take on a fight for the “underdog”. Dog people have a strong code of ethics but this might also cause them to be “dogmatic”, stubborn, selfish and a little eccentric.

They are sometimes cold and aloof because they don’t trust others as well as they are trusted by others. Dog people tend to be serious, have high standards, be critical, a little judgemental and have a sharp tongue. Chatter and gossip is not for them.

Dog children sound like a very loving, interesting and challenging mix who could test your powers of logic and reason.

Remember one little word in there – stubborn! Should you start planning your strategies to deal with stubbornness now?

Jenny Brewster is a midwife from the UK where she practised for fifteen years and then had a gap being a lady of leisure in Cyprus for four years!
Her experience includes lots of hospital work in antenatal, labour and post-natal care. Then she ventured out into the community with team midwifery where six midwives cared for ladies from booking to delivery and up to a month after birth. There was quite a high rate of home deliveries!
She has now been in Singapore with her family for three years and enjoys using her midwifery skills again. Jenny does antenatal classes, breast feeding visits and doula services.

Jill Bromley is counsellor at Mother and Child. She helps to run the post-natal depression group, has offered occasional courses on stress management and relationship stress and is available for individual counselling by appointment.
She can also be found doing office back-up when others are on holidays.

Jill is from South Australia and first completed psychiatric, general, and community health nurse training. As a mature student she added a psychology degree and a post-graduate diploma in applied psychology.
She worked as a lecturer in Health Sciences at Flinders University (South Australia) for 15 years and made several trips to China doing aid and project assessment as part of her university work.
Since retiring in 1998, she travelled with partner Rob, worked for the Youth Service in the UK and then moved to Singapore for more Asian experience in 2001.

In Singapore, she started Fernhill Consultancy, a small company offering counselling and psychology teaching.

Colleen Simmonds was originally from South Africa and is a UK certified classical yoga and prenatal yoga instructor. She has been teaching her own program to pregnant and postnatal women in Singapore for the past 4 years.
Although her personal philosophy is that birth and parenting are a normal expression of our natural instincts, forever realistic, she understands that in today’s world, with many women turning to alternatives such as epidural anaesthesia and caesarean sections.

In order to be useful, yoga must be adapted to the times. As such, her program includes classical postures, which have been altered to help strengthen and prepare the woman’s body for natural birth and the alternatives.

The goal of this program is to make the birth experience before, during and after delivery, a more enjoyable and memorable experience for Mum, Dad and baby!

Maria Hazlett comes from Sunderland in the UK. She is the friendly, super receptionist at Mother and Child and is a qualified nurse and midwife.
Although she has not practised either for a while, her nursing background is very helpful in the receptionist role because she can more readily appreciate the needs of the mothers and babies that come to the centre. She has four children who are now a lot older than the babies who attend the centre but finds the worries and anxieties don’t change much. She is looking forward to helping Uma and other staff to implement all the exciting changes that are in the planning. So, spread the word, “Mother and Child rocks!”

Paula Vettoretti hails from New Zealand. Paula is the office email wizperson. She is married to Paul (as in the song*) and they have two teenage daughters Megan and Gina. They have enjoyed living in Singapore for the past 5 years.
Paula has also been involved with ANZA and the American Chamber of Commerce. She began working at Mother and Child last August, and enjoys meeting all the ladies and babies.
*For those of you too young to remember - the song is, “Hey Hey Paula”.

Nicole Huxley is the Saturday Girl. She is the friendly and helpful year 12 student who helps on Saturdays - when she is not studying or baby-sitting.

Developmental Assessments are recommended at the following key ages:

We are open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5:00pm, and on Saturdays from 10:00am to 5:00pm.

Great new and colourful designs from "Peas and Carrots".

Now available at Mother & Child.

NEW WEBSITE!! Mother & Child Website

Mother and Child Discussion Board

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