The Department of Child and Adolescent Health strives for excellence in clinical service, research, intellectual leadership, advisory and community services and training of undergraduate students and postgraduate doctors. The academic staff is comprised of 10 full time lecturers (4 Professors, 3 Senior Lecturers and 3 Lecturers), 6 full time associate lecturers (full time University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) paediatric consultants), a Public Health Nurse and 25 associate lecturers in affiliated clinical training sites who support the teaching of medical students in public hospitals.
We deliver in-patient care through two paediatric medical wards and a newborn special care unit which includes a neonatal intensive care unit at the University Hospital of the West Indies. We also operate out-patient clinics in adolescent medicine, general paediatrics, child welfare, cardiology, development and behaviour, endocrinology, haematology and oncology, infectious diseases, neonatology, nephrology, neurology, and pulmonology and a Paediatric Casualty.
Research within the Department of Child and Adolescent Health is focused on Paediatric HIV/ AIDS in Jamaica, autism, factors influencing children’s development through childhood, mental health implications for children resulting from caregiver loss, arboviral infections in Jamaican children, birth outcomes in sickle cell disease and adolescent mothers, outcomes of low birth weight and premature neonates, risk and resiliency factors in Jamaican adolescents and cognition in epilepsy.