59-05-032 Proceeding

299 Proceedings of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Congress health services, therefore, this field has a great potential to be extended and expanded within Malaysian context. Study showed that the specific skills need to be addressed in terms of training and professional development in particularly to match with local needs (Azizah, 2015). Inclusive varieties of creative methods and activities can be adopted for specialists in creative arts therapies. Specifically, several aspects need to be considering for training development such as follows: 1. The need to educate those who are beginning to use creative arts practices with several basic concepts and ideas related to creative practices as well as the underlying theory behind this non-verbal approaches. 2. The need to train those who are already utilising creative arts practices to gain deeper understanding and specific skills on the processes and outcomes in creative art therapies. 3. There is a need to revise, adapt or extend current training program to produce a new program more comprehensive and more viable for specialists in a variety of creative arts practices. 4. The inclusive criteria to become practitioners should not be limited to counsellors or particular therapists in a clinical setting, but rather be open to a wider audience such as special need teachers, play workers, nursing, social workers, and parents with the goal of developing more therapeutic work in utilising creative art therapies. 5. There are added value of combining the three kinds of creative approaches that include play therapy, expressive arts therapy and visual art therapy under the umbrella of creative art therapies. The rational of these is that the therapists or practitioners can be employed any kind of wider creative practices, following client’s preferred methods at their own pace. The therapists are therefore able touse a variety of creativemethods, besides having extensive knowledge, ideas and skills in terms of creative process, enabling themto adjust, revise or refine their therapeutic work with any types of clients. Adapted fromAzizah (2015) In conclusion, developing a variety of program and training at different level provided a much deeper understanding for development specialists to revise, refine, adapt or adopt therapeutic skills of wider creative practices to work with, so that the needs of the diverse client groups can be successfully and adequately met. It could be argued that formal training conducted by qualified and fully trained scholars really important in Malaysia. Therefore, creative arts therapy field can be established and extended on the right track following international ethics and code of practices.