The Ministry of Health and Prevention, MoHAP, represented by the Medical Support Services Department, organized a workshop on pediatric metabolic disorders, with the aim of acquainting nutritionists and pediatricians with the updates of metabolism disorder diseases, as well as methods of prevention and treatment.
The workshop was held at Al Qassimi Hospital for Women & Children and moderated by the visiting consultant Dr. Barbara Mariage, an expert in enteral nutrition in children with metabolism disorder.
“MoHAP is keen on organizing awareness-raising workshops and training programs to enhance and develop the medical and scientific knowledge of nutrition practitioners in an effective manner, raise the efficiency and quality of their performance and improve the services provided to children in hospitals. This comes as part of improving the nutrition systems-related strategic plans,” said HE Dr. Youssif Al Serkal, Assistant Undersecretary for the Ministry’s Hospitals Sector.
The Ministry is keen to attract the world’s most eminent health experts, and to follow up on the developments and best global health practices enhance its health services quality, enrich the knowledge of its medical cadres, and to ensure the health of children and adolescents, especially for the inborn errors of metabolism, where pediatrics plays a key role in diagnosing and detecting these genetic diseases.
Dr. Yousif Al Serkal praised the role of Ministry of health in bringing the world’s most important competencies in complicated and rare medical specialties to provide advanced treatment methods and alleviate patient pain.
Dr. Abdulla Al Naqbi, Director of the Medical Support Services Department, said: “The workshop aims to review the latest developments in metabolism disorders and ways of prevention and provide distinguished health services for patients with inborn errors of metabolic disorders, according to international standards. This event would help raise the performance of nutritionists to provide innovative and advanced nutritional care and reduce the hospital stay, the cost of treatment and the rates of metabolic disorders.”
The workshop featured 4 key thematic areas including maple syrup urine disease (msud) which is a rare genetic disorder inhibiting the body's ability to break down many parts of the protein during the metabolism.
In the second theme, Dr. Mariage made a detailed presentation on disorders of the urea cycle in children, the causes, symptoms and appropriate dietary treatment for them.
The third theme focused on the Fatty acid oxidation defects and the nutritional care intervention in critical cases and in the normal conditions of patients.While the fourth theme dealt with emergency protocols for patients with inborn errors of metabolism.