Healthcare | Tuesday 6 January, 2015 12:15 am |

The 3rd Annual International Child Mental and Behavioral Health conference kicks off January 24 and 25, 2015 at the Park Rotana Hotel in Abu Dhabi. It will be attended by many experts and specialists in the field of children’s mental health from around the world. Doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals are encouraged to sign up. Parents of children who have been diagnosed with mental illness or behavioral problems are also invited to attend a session dedicated for that purpose.

This conference covers a range of topics related to child welfare including physical and sexual violence and raising penalties in order to reduce these crimes. Additional subjects will cover mental health issues which affect children such as anxiety, eating disorders, autism, depression, ADHD and intellectual disabilities. There will be regional and international celebrities, U.N good will ambassadors and authors as key note speakers.

Conference chairman, Dr. Ahmad Almai, Consultant and Head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division - MBBS, and certified with the American Board of Psych & Neurology, brings together a variety of key players, specialists, researchers and medical professionals from all over the world, giving the opportunity to attend lectures discussing various mental illnesses, their causes, preventative measures and treatments in addition to workshops for professionals to expand their knowledge in treating children suffering from abuse or developmental disorders.

The conference will focus on integrating services between all agencies that provide services to children with special needs, increasing collaboration between medical and other allied health professionals such as speech, language, occupational, physical and behavioral therapists as well as psychologists to improve the existing scattered and at times inefficient services and raise care quality to the international standards.

Dr. Almai seeks to increase community awareness of children’s mental health issues as a foundation through which medical and other allied health professionals can work with all stages of development for people with mental illness. He stated, “Our goal is to emerge from the conference with an action plan which will translate what we present at the conference into direct application.”
Dr. Almai will be available for interview at the press conference, in addition to other planning committee members.