Latest update November 21st, 2024 1:00 AM
Paediatric care training to include detection of autism
Autism remains one of the challenging conditions that face the delivery of paediatric care, a state of affairs that could be compounded if the requisite human resources and treatment are not readily available.
This disclosure was made by Dr. Narendra Singh, a Guyana-born Paediatrician who currently resides and works in Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Singh was recently appointed External Director of the Masters of Paediatric Programme, which is being offered by the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation’s Institute of Medical Science. He revealed during an interview that “having trained and currently working in North America we have found that when we look for it (autism) in children we find it, and when we find it we have to be very careful that we have the resources to take care of it.”
Dr. Narendra Singh
Autism is a developmental disorder that appears in the first three years of life, and affects the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills. This, according to Dr. Singh, is a very complex illness of varying spectrum where children can have mild to severe symptoms.
Children with autism generally have problems in three crucial areas of development — social interaction, language and behaviour. But because autism symptoms vary greatly, two children with the same diagnosis may act quite differently and have strikingly different skills. In most cases, though, severe autism is marked by a complete inability to communicate or interact with other people.
And in order to address this problem locally, Dr Singh said that part of the Masters of Paediatric Programme curriculum incorporates identifying children with the condition at an early age and outlining how it is treated. He pointed out, though, that the treatment of the condition is not a singular process, as it is not merely the prescribing of a pill or just by a physician treating a condition.
“This is a multi-disciplinary approach that requires care but you also have to have a lot of allied health care people involved in the assessing of children and constant treatment in terms of counselling to get them to be high functioning as they potentially can be…”
With such an approach, Dr. Singh is confident that children inflicted with autism “will be left to smoulder in the community…They are a mess so after identifying you absolutely have to have the resources to be able to treat them and that could be a huge challenge in terms of the kind of resources and the kinds of individuals available to take care of them.”
Dr. Singh pointed out that when conditions such as autism are considered it becomes evident that training in the area of paediatrics is a very comprehensive programme and thus the curriculum can prove to be quite varied. In this regard, he said, that part of the programme has a significant component to deal with mental health in terms of abuse and even non-psychiatric behaviour, thus this is viewed as a vital part of the Paediatric training curriculum.
Five candidates were selected to participate in the inaugural programme and they are benefiting from a faculty which includes a Child Psychiatrist, who according to Dr. Singh, has been spending a great deal of time in Guyana addressing psychiatric as well as non-psychiatric issues in children.
“She has been teaching that part of the curriculum which will include counselling…counselling is a very difficult thing because you need resources, you need skilled people; it is not a simple process such as fixing a cold,” Dr. Singh asserted.
He added too that illnesses related to psychiatric conditions are usually related to deep-seated or many, many years of abuse and/or poor environment where children are brought up.
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