Knowledge, practices of caregivers in the management and rehabilitation of mental retarded children with down syndrome; case study of the Jamot hospital Yaoundé Cameroon

Abstract

Knowledge, practices of caregivers in the management and rehabilitation of mental retarded children with down syndrome; case study of the Jamot hospital Yaoundé Cameroon in the field of special education and more especially in mental disabilities and counselling, and brings out the efficacy of the caregivers management and rehabilitation of mental retarded children with down syndrome and how it can be used to develop rehabilitation of mental retarded children with down syndrome. The general objective of our work is to bring out the understanding of knowledge, practices of caregivers in the management of mental retarded children with down syndrome in the Jamot Hospital Yaounde and how it contribute to the rehabilitation of those children and their overall wellbeing. In the theoretical framework we had to show what has been done so far. With these we brought our research question which was to guide our work which took the following format: Does the knowledge, practices of caregivers in their management in the Jamot Hospital Yaounde contribute to the rehabilitation of mental retarded children with Down syndrome? So, with this our research hypotheses which we worked with was: the knowledge, practices of caregivers in the Jamot Hospital Yaounde contribute to the rehabilitation of mental retarded children with Down syndrome. To prove this our hypotheses we had to use a qualitative method as our method of research. In this, we had to choose a sample of studies which brought us to have 3 subjects which we tested our hypotheses on them. This observation took place in Jamot Hospital Yaounde. The subjects were subjected to do an observation in a period of over two months in their psychiatric department which we had to put them in condition and so also the strategies which the care givers used on their knowledge, practices on children with Down syndrome. During this research we discovered the knowledge, practices of the child changed positively depending on the relation between the Down syndrome child and the caregiver who has to use the strategies on the mental retarded children with Down syndrome. This is so because these Down syndrome children being different from other children needs to be treated cordially as such by the caregivers.