Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) has officially launched the second edition of its autism workshop under the theme ‘Empowering voices for autism’.
The 5-day workshop, scheduled from 1st to 5th August 2023 at the Kofi-Ohene Konadu Auditorium, University of Professional Studies-Accra, is specially designed for parents with special children to educate them on understanding the needs of their children.
Neurodiversity refers to variations in brain activity that have an impact on daily mental processes. So instead of seeing these disparities as undesirable or negative, neurodiversity accepts them as a natural expression of humanity’s diversity.
The exercise offers a one-on-one consultation section with medical experts to assess children’s development.
The available specialists for the one-on-one consultation are a speech therapist, behaviour analyst, occupational therapist, developmental psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, special education specialist and a parent counsellor.
This section will pave the way for mothers to meet these experts, whereby the mothers of children with special needs are given insights into how to understand and handle the behaviour and attitude of their children at a certain time.
Projecting the role of individuals in the community to empower voices of autism, the 5 A’s of autism were considered: Awareness, Advocacy, Acceptance, Assistance and Appreciation. In other words, individuals in various communities must know about autism so as to teach others.
Again, there is a need to speak out against discrimination in communities, create an inclusive environment where individuals with autism are welcomed and celebrated, offer support and assistance within one’s community, and recognise and promote the values of neurodiversity.
In a press interview, the Managing Director of GTBank, John Thomas, said autism is not a death sentence; however, mothers with special children should embrace such conditions – insisting that those children have the right to live and hence should be treated with care.
He further mentioned that schools need a level of enlightenment and education on how to handle autism, saying: “It is more about information, that’s why we are focusing on children with special needs – which is part of the problem we want to solve,”
“Hopefully, we have school proprietors in our midst; we have caregivers and we also have parents around, so our experts are here to take them through what they know and what to do, and help them to engage better with students who have special needs,” he added.
Moreover, the Director-General of Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, revealed that there is a lack of general understanding about autism. He noted that some studies have shown that 3.8 thousand children in Ghana have autism spectrum.
“I believe that parents and teachers find it difficult to identify such cases, that is why we initiated the nurturing care in the year 2019 as an opportunity to identify and develop these children to ensure we identify them early and address them at an early stage,” he said.
According to him, the Ghana Health Service has been doing its best to create awareness and also organise health screenings for children at the ages of 4 and 5 in KG 2 for the past years as part of ways to address issues of such nature.
“We organise child promotion week, and these are some of the topics that we tackle… on our child welfare programme where we do child nutrition and vaccination, this education is given to caregivers for awareness’ sake,” he added.
