Qatar is participating with the countries of the world in marking World Autism Awareness Day, which falls on April 2 under the slogan "Transformation: Toward a Neuro-Inclusive World for All."
On this occasion, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Qatar Foundation, and Shafallah Center launched an awareness campaign aimed at educating families and parents on the best ways to communicate with their loved ones with an autism spectrum disorder.
Qatar played an important role in raising awareness of autism spectrum disorder at the international level. In 2007, HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser supported the campaign that called for designating a day for marking World Autism Awareness Day during the 62nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, which was approved unanimously by all UN member states.
In addition to designating the second of April as World Autism Awareness Day, the resolution encouraged Member States to take the necessary measures to raise awareness about autism in their communities.
As part of the awareness campaign to mark World Autism Awareness Day, the ministry organizes a virtual training program to rehabilitate families on proper ways to deal with children and adults and ways to develop life skills and effective communication, especially families of individuals who have learning difficulties, autism, behavioral problems, speech delay or school problems.
Also, the ministry organizes, in cooperation with the Al Maha Pediatric Specialized Care Center, a training program to raise the efficiency of health practitioners specialized in dealing with individuals with an autism spectrum disorder.
HMC is organizing Sunday awareness activities and recreational activities for children with autism spectrum disorder and their families at Al Maha Pediatric Specialized Care Center and Al Wakra Hospital to provide them with the necessary support and bring joy and happiness to their souls. These events provide an opportunity for families to exchange experiences, which will have a great impact on building communication networks between parents and specialists. Also, HMC participates in global solidarity with people with autism spectrum disorder by lighting its multi-story parking building in blue.
The program for families, organized by the MOPH, aims to train all families of people with developmental disorders. The program is designed to provide participants with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to apply learning principles and strategies and analyze and modify children's behaviour.
The objectives of the training program include identifying developmental disorders and practices with scientific evidence, the most important principles, laws, and strategies for analyzing and modifying children's behavior, understanding them and their uses, applying methods for analyzing children's behavior according to the basic analysis unit, identifying mechanisms for measuring behavior by correct measurement methods to make sound educational decisions, and evaluating the child's behavior in direct and indirect ways, as a prelude to building procedures aimed at modifying the child's behavior.
Also, the program's objectives contain analyzing tasks and skills for their basic parts to facilitate the process of training and learning for children, in addition to identifying ways and methods to increase students motivation and teach them new skills, and applying the intensive separate attempts protocol to train children to acquire various skills (cognitive, linguistic, motor, etc) quickly and easily.
At the end of the training program, presented by Mahmoud Al Sheyab, founder and general manager of the ABA Resources foundation, which specializes in providing solutions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder, participants will receive a special certificate if they achieve the program criteria, which is attending 80 percent of the program work and active participation during the lectures.
The training program for health practitioners reviews many important points, particularly ways to diagnose autism spectrum disorder, identify the individual strengths of the person with autism, treatment strategies, behavioral competence, individualized education plan (IEP), specific intervention, teaching strategies on autism, and the evaluation tools used to measure progress.
The program gives autism professionals access to 14 hours of continuing education (CE) self-paced online training at any time of the day from anywhere in the world.
The training modules for health practitioners include speaker biography, module introduction, video presentation, presentation notes, and knowledge check to ensure proficiency.
After training is completed, the health practitioner receives a study guide to prepare for the final online proficiency test.
Practitioners who complete one of the certificate programs available in training also obtain an internationally recognized professional accreditation.
Autism is a lifelong condition that affects how an individual communicates and interacts with others and the world. The term "autism spectrum" is used to describe this condition because individuals affected are affected in different ways and to varying degrees, and in most cases the cause is unknown.
