The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Neurosciences students to be trained in clinical care

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 11, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Neurosciences students to be trained in clinical care

By Our Special Correspondent

Venu Srinivasan (second from left) seen at the inauguration of the T.S. Srinivasan Centre for Clinical Neurosciences in Chennai on Thursday. Krishnamoorthy Srinivas (right) looks on. — Photo: N. Balaji

CHENNAI, FEB. 10. The T.S. Srinivasan Centre for Clinical Neurosciences here will train M.S. Neurosciences students in clinical care, thanks to a memorandum of understanding it signed with Madras University.

The centre, inaugurated today by the industrialist and chairman and managing director, TVS Motors, Venu Srinivasan, focussed on community-based neuropsychiatric care and will combine this with education and research.

During its short period of existence before the formal inauguration, the centre has acquired important projects and fellowships funded by organisations including the World Health Organisation, The Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London.

While it has already established links with the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, students from the Madras University's A.L. Mudaliar Postgraduate Institute of Basic Medical Sciences will join the list of beneficiaries of the centre.

It aims at establishing training programmes at various levels, starting with primary health workers, nurses, physical and psychological therapists, doctors and social workers in clinical neurosciences.

Clinical care

Two concepts are being propagated by the centre: developing the clinical neuropsychiatrist, who at the community level will combine neurological and psychiatric expertise to deliver high quality clinical care, and a multinodal community-based neuropsychiatric therapist, who will combine physical, occupational and psychological skills to deliver comprehensive rehabilitation to patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Mr. Srinivasan expressed the hope that it would emerge as an international centre for community-based neuropsychiatric care.

The Madras University Vice-Chancellor, S.P.Thyagarajan, said the university had started innovating, entering the realm of inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional activities, to usher in education with vibrancy.

The professor and head of the department of Anatomy, R. Muthusamy, elaborated on the course details.

The visiting professors of neurology, Lewis Rowland and Anne Young, and the director of the new centre, E.S. Krishnamoorthy, participated in the inaugural function.

Earlier, addressing a press conference, the chairman, VHS Department of Neurology, Krishnamoorthy Srinivas, said the 25th T.S. Srinivasan Endowment Oration would be delivered by Prof. Anne Young, Julienne Dorn Professor and Chair in Clinical Neurology, Harvard Medical School, on February 12 at Hotel Park Sheraton here.

The oration is titled "From Molecules to Medicine: The challenge of brain degeneration in the 21st Century," and is sponsored by the T.S. Srinivasan Charitable Trust through the Centre for Clinical Neurosciences and the department of Clinical Neurology and Research, Public Health Centre.

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