Seeing the Whole Child: Beyond the Diagnosis with Dr. Sudipta Sen

Thank you so much.

And for the purpose of our audience, what does your day-to-day work entail, your regular work now?

Yeah, I wear several hats.

Of course, a bulk of my work is in NHS and I also have my own private healthcare company.

So in NHS, I hold, apart from being a clinical lead in my community paediatric services, I'm also the name doctor for safeguarding children of my borough.

And that puts me into a certain niche where where I have had to do a lot of training and I have to be in a lot of very difficult situation where I'm championing young persons.

So safeguarding is a big part of my job.

Other than that, I do assessments of all children in the NHS.

My role is essentially under five for leading the autism service and in my private capacity.

I specialize all the way through transition care up to 19 to 20 for autism, ADHD, dyspraxia, or discoordination difficulties, and specialist sleep support.

I also like to teach and train quite a lot and invest in a lot of seminars, webinars, and championing some of the causes like ADHD embrace, doing webinars for adults, SENCO and teachers because I find it perfectly a good role to play where I can work and explain the perspective of this children and young person and support all the way CP etc.

You've got a busy life but a very varied career and in all the situations like you said you're championing the voice of young people as well which is so important it's so important.

So when we look at your career, you built it around a very child-centered, holistic approach to looking at things.

Was there a particular moment that you decided to take that approach? Because you and I know that in our regular work, we're consistently surrounded by strict protocols, strict guidelines, strict, you know, and sometimes you have to make sure that You keep yourself still the doctor that you are in the midst of all these pillars that are around you.

And in the services of today, if you are not taking that human approach, you can become locked into these pillars.

So was there a particular moment that resulted in you saying, no, I have to see things from a holistic view?

Yes, this is very, very important because one thing I feel is that increasingly we are becoming too focused on forms, on processes, on screening tools.

And I feel that these are not always justified because of it.

It is becoming increasingly hard because we expect people even to do everything online.

People have different level of education, learning, lived in experience.

It is completely an unnatural situation that we are working for.

So one thing I have done in my career is that to look beyond certain referrals.

Because to understand, maybe it is a very sketchy referral.

Maybe I can delay the process by going back and forth, back and forth, back and back and forth to the referrer and others give me more information and then I will decide so on and so forth.

But what I've always tried to do is that what are they trying to say in between the lines? So where is this concern coming from? Is this somebody who is really failing to thrive in nursery? Is this somebody who is having significant challenging behavior at home, which nobody's seeing at school? Is it somebody who is refusing school because of certain kind of other underlying comorbidities? Is it somebody? who is not fitting to a diagnosis.