Healthy Beginnings screens Sisters children in annual visit

Healthy Beginnings screenings help identify children's needs. photo by Jim Mitchell Once a year, Healthy Beginnings offers Sisters families free health screenings for their children. Last Thursday, October 21, 25 Sisters families had appointments to go through the screening.

Holly Remer, Executive Director, said, "Deschutes County is one of the only counties that has a community screening program for children. The service is offered to families free-of-charge because of the donation of time and services by volunteers and by organizations such as Kiwanis."

Bringing the screening to Sisters once a year, Remer said, "We bring specialists from the community -- dentist, audiologist, speech pathologist, health nurse, nutritionist, behavior and developmental specialists, all to do assessments of children birth to five. We try to identify any concerns or give parents information about any community resources they may not be familiar with."

Remer said that often parents do not realize this is very different from a pediatric visit; completely different things are assessed.

"We have quite a few examples of dramatic hearing loss that have been detected in our screening that were not identified at a pediatric exam," she said. "We identify a lot of development concerns.

"Many parents don't know that a child needs to see a dentist by the age of one and that dental problems in a child under the age of five can be life-threatening. We do experience pre-emergency and, on occasion, emergency conditions in our screening."

Carolyn Nelson, audiologist with High Desert ENT and "full-time" volunteer, said she frequently finds fluid or ear wax impeding hearing. Occasionally she finds a sensory neural loss. She said that they are now testing babies from birth using acoustic emissions, in which the sound is heard by the inner ear and echoed back.

Steve and Anna Moore represented the American Red Cross. Their staffing information center provided generalized information and handouts on specific Red Cross services. One of their primary demonstrations used life-size dolls to demonstrate emergency procedures for choking.

Ted Lynch, Sisters orthodontist and past pediatric dentist, is a regular. He does Healthy Beginnings dental exams in Sisters and Bend. He is "pleasantly surprised" at the lack of dental problems he has encountered.

Remer conducted the Early Childhood Development screening for birth to three-year-olds. It is a parent-guided assessment, in which "we try to identify where the child is in conceptual development and motor-skill development, personal social development, and speech."

The next monthly screenings are in Redmond and Bend. For more information call 383-6357.