Makerere NCD Symposium

Prevention of cardiac disease starts in utero and through out adolescence, great meeting with Uganda Heart Association 8th Annual Congress 2023

Dr. Sabrina Kitaka 2023
An Adolescent is someone aged 10-19 years. Adolescence is a period of rapid transition from childhood to adulthood and during this time alot of changes take place including puberty which is initiated by hormones. Girls will start their menstruation and boys their spermache. There are specific stages of development that both boys and girls go through when developing secondary sexual characteristics. These are the physical characteristics of males and females that are not involved in reproduction, such as voice changes, body shape, p***c hair distribution, and facial hair.Adolescence is riddled with experimentation and questioning and sometimes even mood changes. Adolescence is a time of transition during which the brain is growing for the very last time and adolescents can make irrational decisions based on peer influence. The world has over 1.3 billion adolescents and this means 1:5 people are adolescents. In Uganda with our population of nearly 42 million, nearly 1:3 people is an adolescent. It is therefore urgent for all health professionals to be interested in understanding how to manage an Adolescent,and be able to provide a better service for them either on site or by Referal. Adolescent Health and Medicine Training has been around for over 60 years in the developed world, but is becoming increasingly important in the developing world. In 2015,the WHO released a policy aimed at increasing the number of health professionals who are Adolescent Responsive. In adolescence, health services have an important role to play in addressing a subset of conditions that have a large contribution to adolescent disease burden and are sensitive to timely interventions by health services, such as mental health conditions, sexual and reproductive health needs, malnutrition and communicable diseases. However, health expenditures tend to be disproportionately skewed toward the under fives, adults and the elderly. Investments are needed to build adolescent responsive health systems with a focus on regulations addressing adolescent evolving capacity and autonomy, anticipatory models of care that can effectively detect and address these risks within an adolescent’s everyday context, adolescent competent providers, adolescent protective financial policies and adolescent-responsive health information systems.We all have a duty to help ALL adolescents and support them to make correct choices as they grow.We have a duty to protect them from harmful practices while providing preventive health care services like Immunization, counseling, nutrition advice and career guidance. Adolescents deserve to be treated with dignity and respect and without a judgmentmental attitude.Their confidentiality as is needed for all patients must be maintained. There is no reason whatsoever for an adult of sound mind to share details of an Adolescent Health condition purported or real.This includes sharing images, stories, or communication shared in confidence unless there is a rational defined objective for breaking confidentiality. Adolescents come from various backgrounds, some are from rich families and others are poor and are the heads of households. We must be careful not to tip the balance by bullying them and throw them into depression or something detrimental. Adolescents on the other hand should abide by rules that are set by their parents, schools and the national justice, law and order system. This can be demonstrated by the recent apprehension of an adolescent who physically abused her friend or by various examples of students who are given school punishments. Adolescent Health friendly services such as the Friday Adolescent Clinic at Makerere and Mulago Hospital ;The Naguru Teenage Centre ;Reach a Hand Uganda ;Reproductive Health Uganda and others are some examples of where Adolescent Clients can be seen by a professional. Most adolescents spend 60% of their time in school and they will need specialized approaches to manage their unique challenges. Parents are the first providers of their children and adolescents and they need to skill themselves with tools on how to support the adolescent. We have all been adolescents at one point and did alot of things but turned out well. So let us support our children because they are the future of our next generation. Seek meaningful support from a professional and remember prevention is better than cure. It is much easier to treat a child than repair a broken man. One such quote in the USA is by the abolitionist leader and author Frederick Douglass who in 1855, in dialogue with white-slave owners about the immortality of slavery, wrote, *“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”* Today slavery and bo***ge comes in various forms including addiction to illicit drugs, addiction to digital devices, corruption and forgery, slavery comes in the lack of respect for others and in the computer misuse act.

https://youtu.be/bPXkuZgk3-s

Dr. Sabrina Kitaka: Parenting Adolescents Part 1| Sanyuka Morning Express "For more of these videos, follow the link below to subscribe to our channel today. bit.ly/NextMedi...

Three days to go....

Child and Adolescent Health symposium Soon!

This year marks the 8th Annual Adolescent Health Conference, and 5th Clinical & Scientific meeting of the Society of Adolescent Health in Uganda.

Theme: Transitions in Care: Children to Adolescents to Young adults.

Participants attending the opening ceremony of the SYMPOSIUM 2018 were joined by the Hon Minister of Health,Dr.Jane Ruth Aceng(Center),the Chancellor of Makerere,Dr.Ezra Suruma and other high profile dignitaries

Kevin Mortimer setting the scene for the importance of respiratory NCDs at Makerere NCD Symposium

You can download and read through all the paper works on for the Makerere NCD Symposium in this link;

MakNCD Symposium Abstract Book | MAKERERE UNIVERSITY 2018 INTERNATIONAL NCD SYMPOSIUM Dr. John Omagino is a cardiac surgeon and thoracic surgeon in Uganda. He is the executive director of Uganda Heart Institute (UHI). He is also a member of the board of directors of UHI.

Trauma session at ;

Self harm, & epilepsy, are some of the diseases left out in global burden of disease.

"we are doing capacity building at the Uganda Heart Institute to include all other disciplines of health care like pharmacists in cardiac care" -Dr. Omangino

Anders Gustafsson explaining the association between periodontitis & cardiovascular disease which are by the way some of the non communicable diseases

Poster Viewing and Discussion session at Day 2.