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Identifying Children with Special Health Care Needs in Alexandria, Egypt

Description

Children with special health care needs (CSHCN) are defined as: “those who have or are at increased risk for a chronic physical, developmental, behavioural, or emotional condition and who also require health and related services of a type or amount beyond that required by children generally.” The care of CSHCN is a significant public health issue. These children are medically complex, require services and supports well beyond those that typically developing children require, and command a considerable proportion of the pediatric health care budget. Different tools were used to identify CSHCN. One of them is the CSHCN screener which uses a non-condition specific approach that identifies children across a range and diversity of childhood chronic conditions and special needs. It identifies children with elevated or unusual needs for health care or educational services due to a chronic health condition. It focuses on health consequences a child experiences as a result of having an ongoing health condition rather than on the presence of a specific diagnosis or type of disability. It allows a more comprehensive assessment of the performance of the health care system than is attainable by focusing on a single diagnosis. The CSHCN screener is only available in English and Spanish. In developing countries, obtaining reliable prevalence rates for CSHCN is challenging. Sophisticated datasets associated with governmental services and high quality research studies are less common due to fewer resources. Egypt has no screening or surveillance systems for identifying CSHCN.

Objective: To test the feasibility of using an Arabic version of CSHCN Screener in identifying CSHCN in the Egyptian setup and to estimate the prevalence of CSHCN among children aged 6-14 years in Alexandria, Egypt using the Arabic version of the CSHCN Screener.

Submitted by elamb on