Detection of disabilities by schoolchildren: a pilot study in rural Pakistan

An important consideration in planning services for disabled children is to establish the need, including the size of the potential beneficiary group. However, surveys are expensive and time consuming (especially surveys of d isability, which has a low prevalence within the population), and can raise expectations of service for patients who are often very unsure about how t o cope with their disabled child. The World Health Organization (WHO) has p roduced a series of survey tools' which have been used to identify disabled children in settings where a service is planned. Zaman et al.(2) produced the '10 Question Screen', a simple screening tool for use by community heal th staff to identify disabilities among children in the community. Both the WHO survey tools and the 10 Question Screen rely on trained primary health care (PHC) or community-based rehabilitation (CBR) staff. The small study reported here shows that schoolchildren are effective identifiers of disabl ed children within their home communities and may be a useful resource when there are no trained CBR or PHC workers to conduct surveys. Furthermore, t he children's ability to identify within the five major disability groups w as relatively robust when compared with medical diagnosis.