Children and adolescents with physical disabilities – describing characteristics and disability-related needs in the Kilimanjaro region, north-eastern Tanzania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children and adolescents with physical disabilities in North-Eastern Tanzania experience significant impairments in speech, mobility, communication, self-care, and walking. Rehabilitation services, which are vital for addressing these limitations, are either unavailable or difficult to access. There is an urgent need to improve access to rehabilitation services in urban and rural areas to enhance the well-being of these children. A cross-sectional community survey was conducted in the Kilimanjaro region from November 2020 to June 2021. The study involved 212 children and adolescents aged 2 to 18 years with physical disabilities.Trained research assistants interviewed primary carers of children using a questionnaire based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health – Children and Youth (ICF-CY) Framework. Data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 27, and the Pearson chi-square test was applied to examine differences in needs based on age and sex. Nearly 40% of participants had severe impairments in speech (n=84) and joint mobility (n=79), while more than half (n=124) faced severe or complete difficulties in walking. Most participants experienced severe or complete challenges with self-care tasks, including personal hygiene, toileting, dressing, eating, and drinking. Almost 70% (n=135) of households were located near health facilities that lacked rehabilitation services, and around a quarter (n=51) of participants had never received rehabilitation services. Additionally, over 90% of the children (n=196) required assistive devices, and 193 required therapeutic exercises, with more than three-quarters needing nutritional support (n=162) Understanding the magnitude of disability-related needs is essential for generating evidence to guide planners and stakeholders. Assessing the specific characteristics of disabilities is also vital in improving targeted interventions. This study highlights the critical need for services and support, including assistive devices and rehabilitation, to address the impairments and challenges children and their families face. The general aim was to describe the characteristics and disability-related needs of children and adolescents with physical disabilities in the Kilimanjaro region, North-Eastern Tanzania. The specific aims are to: first, describe characteristics such as social demographics, types of diagnoses and self-reported complications; second, describe impairments (visual, hearing, speech, joint mobility) and activity limitations (communication, mobility, washing, toileting, dressing, eating, drinking), and third, describe the services available (nearby healthcare facilities, access to rehabilitation, possession of health insurance).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".