Venue: Salwa ballroom # 3
Christin Vlahos - Clinical Psychologist. Psychiatry Department – Sidra Medicine
Atif Magbool - Child Psychiatrists, Psychiatry Department – Sidra Medicine
Yahia Albobali - Senior Psychiatry Resident – HMC Mental Health Service
Medical adherence is an important challenge that cuts across all subspecialties, and is a common referral question for mental health services in pediatric medical settings. Poor adherence compromises the effectiveness of treatment and medical interventions, jeopardizes the patient’s safety, increases healthcare costs, and can lead to poor outcomes. Therefore, the need for both pre-treatment patient screening prior to making important medical decisions, and effective individualized interventions to improve adherence, have been identified as a priority in medical settings. This need may present either in an inpatient or outpatient setting, for both acute and chronic health conditions. The problem of poor adherence is complex, as it involves multiple parties and complex systems, and should also be informed by theories of child development.
Given the above, working within the framework of a multidisciplinary team in the medical setting offers the opportunity to open lines of communication, get a better understanding of the patient and their difficulties, and offer a more holistic approach to improving adherence. Providers in Qatar should be able to combine the empirically-based, scientific knowledge and expertise that has so far been accumulated internationally, with a good understanding of the cultural aspects that can influence patient behavior.
At the conclusion of this activity, participants will be able to:
- Define pediatric medical adherence and its importance
- Understand the theoretical framework for behavior change
- Consider the interface of medical adherence and child development
- Identify the basic steps towards designing an individualized behavioral intervention
- Describe ways to measure the effectiveness of such interventions
- Address challenges within a medical, multidisciplinary, and multi-cultural setting
