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ACCIDENTS IN MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN
Author(s) -
Williams Cyril E.
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
developmental medicine and child neurology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.658
H-Index - 143
eISSN - 1469-8749
pISSN - 0012-1622
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8749.1973.tb05179.x
Subject(s) - citation , mentally retarded , reading (process) , psychology , library science , psychiatry , medicine , computer science , developmental psychology , linguistics , philosophy
the matter, he then strikes at the roots of adolescent medicine when he says: ‘To understand the young and to help them, we must be of open mind and heart’. As paediatricians enter this field they must be prepared to pass on their sympathy for the child as a child to the adolescent as an adolescent. But children and adolescents are very different, both in the normal and abnormal. A thorough study of the normal adolescent way of thinking is just as important as it is with the normal child. The more one works with adolescents and children, the greater the realisation that the emotional changes of adolescence can take place at a very early age: between childhood and adolescence is pre-adolescence. DR. R. E. SMITH reported on his vast experience with cases of undescended testess which have, of course, a greater impact at adolescence than at any other time, and WINGCOMMANDER HALL gave his experience with hypertensive young adults in the Royal Air Force-mainly males’. He says that paediatricians do not take blood pressure frequently enough and he suggests that if we did we might find more cases of hypertension in childhood than we do. Harsh words perhaps, but possibly correct. We hope that the Society for Adolescent Medicine will continue to,visit the U.K. annually and will continue to stimulate interest in this field. Paediatrics in the Seventies* did, of course, recommend that each District General Hospital should have an adolescent inpatient unit, since the problems of nursing adolescents (in its broadest sense) are totally different from either children or adults. With the advancing age of patients on general medical and surgical wards, it is totally wrong that emotionally incompletely developed individuals should be exposed to what can often be a very traumatic experience-a patient dying suddenly in the next bed for instance-when it is unnecessary. All that is required in each District General Hospital is a 10-bed area for each sex to take all those between 12 and 18 years who do not require intensive speciality nursing. It is reasonable that such a unit should be near to the children’s wards because the principle behind both units is the same, but this is not essential. Most cases are ‘speciality’ cases or surgical ones, so there is no question of the paediatrician ‘taking over’, as some of our colleagues think. The supervising r81e of the paediatrician on the adolescent unit should be just the same as on the children’s wards.