Mission:

Providing the best up-to-date respiratory care for our pediatric patients in Ahmadi Hospital is our main mission. Also Pediatric sleep medicine is a growing field of medicine. It’s a branch of medicine that deals with any sleep-related conditions.

Type of patients seen by Respiratory/sleep disorders physician:

1. Chronic respiratory conditions like: Asthma, chronic lung disease due to prematurity, cystic fibrosis, lung diseases due to other disorders like heart, kidney, immune diseases, etc.
2. Foreign body aspiration.
3. Children who requires chronic ventilation
4. Sleep related breathing issues: like obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea (child don’t have adequate breathing).
5. Other sleep related issues: sleep walking, sleep talking, night terror, night mares, narcolepsy, cataplexy, etc.

Services provided by Respiratory/sleep team:

1. Pulmonary function testing (soon): used to diagnose children with asthma and lung disease and help in defining response to therapy.
2. Bronchoscopy: this is done in operation theatre. We use bronchoscopy for diagnostic and therapeutic indications. After putting child a sleep, a small camera is passed through trachea (the breathing tube) to check if there is congenital anomaly and to take some fluid for culture. Also we use bronchoscopy to retrieve foreign body if suspected.
3. Overnight oximetry testing: we test oxygen and heart beat second by second to test whether child needs oxygen, and whether he/she has difficulty breathing during sleep.
4. Sleep laboratory (soon): here we test in detail the sleep behavior in children. We test sleep depth, breathing, oxygen, movement. This will help to identify whether the child has airway obstruction, stop breathing or has abnormal movement during sleep.