Four pediatric centres in Montreal are combining resources to make it easier to treat children living with musculoskeletal disorders.
The Shriners Hospital, the Montreal Children’s, Ste. Justine and Marie-Enfant Rehabilitation Centre have launched Musco to better coordinate the care of children with severe musculoskeletal disorders.
To help make it happen, the Mirella and Lino Saputo Foundation is donating $10 million.
“I hope everyone will learn to work together,” says Mirella Saputo. “We could bring more efficiency; we could bring more help.”
The effort is to help patients like four-year-old Nayla Cando Jarry who has cerebral palsy and can’t move around without a cane or wheelchair. Her mother Cristina Cando says caring for her is tough.
“It’s like going to the war and you don’t know what’s going to happen the next day,” she tells Global News.
The child is a patient at all four institutions and it has created problems.
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“There’s a lot of people saying different things to you, different opinions on the child,” her mother says. “Then you’re trying to figure out which one is the best for your child, and it’s not that easy.”
Because her daughter’s medical history wasn’t readily shared among some of those institutions, she had to wait months for appointments sometimes, or had gaps in treatment. The same happened to other patients, too.
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The plan for the Musco programme is to hire staff, build infrastructure, buy equipment and offer training among other things, then hopefully expand.
“So establish basically milestones or guidelines or benchmarks, if you prefer, that will then be applied across Quebec or presumably across Canada,” explains Dr. Jean-Pierre Farmer, Neurosurgeon and Surgeon-in-chief at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
Cando thinks the program will make it easier for her daughter.
“It’s going to be easier maybe to receive treatment,” she smiles.
Luca Patuelli says this kind of collaboration would have been good for him when he was a child. He has arthrogryposis.
“There was a lot of surgery that was trial and error,” he says, recounting how difficult it was for doctors to diagnose his condition.
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Though he agrees Musco will be helpful to sick kids, as an adult patient, he now wants to see better coordination among his doctors, too.
“A more elaborate communication structure for patients of all different types of disabilities when they’re 21 and over,” he says, describing an example.
He’s pushing for it, and thinks Musco might be a gateway.
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