Pediatricians, hailing from hospitals and health care centers across Lebanon, congregated at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC)’s Issam Fares Hall on the 22nd and 23rd of February for the 4th Annual Pediatrics Update Symposium, addressing cutting-edge updates on pediatric and adolescent medicine topics, relevant to Lebanon and the Arab region.
Organized by AUBMC’s Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, in joint sponsorship with the Cleveland Clinic, the symposium covered a wide range of topics of interest to the pediatric community in Lebanon as well as to general practitioners. Besides General Pediatrics, symposium themes included pediatric specialties like hematology, nephrology, adolescent medicine, pain and palliative care, quality improvement and child protection.
Participating pediatricians, family medicine doctors, nurses and other child and adolescent health care professionals “brushed up on their pediatrics knowledge” at the symposium, where they received updates on the latest practice guidelines related to child and adolescent care, learned about proper referrals to subspecialty care when needed and discussed the most recent pediatric and adolescent medicine research updates and their application as related to Lebanon and the region.
For the fourth year and with great success, the symposium featured world renowned authorities in pediatric subspecialties such as Dr. Marianne De Montalambert, pediatric hematologist at the Necker Enfants Malades Hospital in France; Dr. Stefan Friedrichsdorf, leading world authority in Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care; Dr. Amin Barakat, Lebanese-American pediatric nephrologist, known for his diagnosis of hereditary congenital kidney disease Barakat Syndrome; as well as faculty from the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, home to the first and only adolescent medicine sub-specialty in Lebanon.
Professor of Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology Oncology and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at AUBMC, Dr. Miguel Abboud welcomed all the symposium participants and thanked symposium chair Dr. Sami Sanjad, who instated this pivotal educational event, which is a major Continuing Medical Education (CME) activity held by AUBMC’s Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine for the community physicians.
Dr. Abboud highlighted the role of AUBMC in medical education, elaborating on the recent restructuring of the department to optimize medical education and to further activate medical research in line with the AUBMC 2020 Vision.
Pediatric Palliative Care and pain management in children were extensively discussed on the first day of the symposium, with Dr. Friedrichsdorf elaborating on the concept of palliative care and dismantling common myths and assumptions about it; and Dr. Huda Abu-Saad Huijer, professor of Nursing Science and Director of the Rafic Hariri School of Nursing at AUB describing the challenging legal and institutional framework for palliative care in Lebanon and detailing the stages of developing a palliative care working group and foundation in the country.
Pediatric Palliative Care is specialized medical care for children with serious illnesses, with the goal of relieving pain, distressing the symptoms and stress of serious illness and improving the child’s quality of life. “It’s promising the child that she/he will not suffer,” explained Dr. Friedrichsdorf, but providing palliative care however, does not mean stopping the search for a cure. One of the common myths about palliative care is that it starts when treatment stops. “Providing palliative care is to help children with serious illnesses live well and then, when the time is certain, help them die gently,” clarified Dr. Friedrichsdorf. Pediatric palliative care is, hence, “the aggressive management of disease to maintain and improve the quality of life,” he said.
In her presentation, Dr. Abu-Saad Huijer discussed the legal and institutional framework for palliative care and the stages of the process of instituting a base for a palliative care program in Lebanon. “Palliative care is not recognized as a specialty by the order of physicians in Lebanon and is thus not reimbursable, the laws and directives governing the field do not facilitate end-of-life planning and management, opioids on the Lebanese market are limited and opioid prescription is legally restricted to cancer patients,” she summarized.
The day also featured a presentation on child advocacy by Dr. Bernard Gerbaka, professor of Pediatrics and Pediatric Emergency Medicine at the Universite Saint Joseph and founder and president of “Child of Lebanon”, highlighting the significant role of pediatricians as child advocates and child’s rights defendants as well as the social and legal aspects of pediatricians’ work when it comes to identifying and following up medical cases dealing with actual or suspected child abuse and neglect.
