A two-day national workshop on the Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism concluded on Saturday at the Pediatrics department of the Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, with Vice-Chancellor Prof. Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi and senior faculty stressing early identification, multidisciplinary care and more trained manpower for children on the autism spectrum.
The workshop aimed to build skills in administering, scoring and interpreting the ISAA, and to push awareness so that families and clinicians move toward timely intervention. ISAA is a structured Indian assessment tool used when clinicians need a standardised read on autism spectrum presentations; training doctors and allied staff to use it correctly is the practical core of a meeting like this one.
Prof. Chaturvedi told the gathering that awareness shapes dignity and care for children on the spectrum, that early intervention matters, and that psychology, neurology, psychiatry and paediatrics have to work together rather than in silos. Prof. Ankur Singh, Head of Pediatrics, said autism had become an important part of paediatric practice and that trained manpower and facilities remained short of need. Dr Kumari Divya Singh, the organising secretary, underlined early identification, proper assessment and evidence-based intervention.
IMS Director Prof. S. N. Sankhwar spoke for timely detection and intervention. Prof. Sanjay Gupta, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, pressed the multidisciplinary approach. Prof. Puneet, Medical Superintendent of Sir Sunderlal Hospital, said early detection and the right assessment tools help clinicians decide when and how to intervene. Those lines, taken together, are the institutional message from Saturday’s close: assess early, train more hands, and keep the specialties in one room.
For Varanasi and the wider Purvanchal catchment that feeds IMS-BHU, the gap the speakers named is familiar. Families often arrive late, after school failure or severe behavioural stress, because the first contact clinician never ran a structured screen. A national workshop does not by itself fill district manpower gaps, but it leaves a cohort of trainees who have practised ISAA scoring under faculty watch.
Autism spectrum care is clinical and family-sensitive; the story is the training event and the faculty emphasis, not case histories. Readers seeking assessment for a child should go through the Pediatrics and related specialty desks at IMS or their local paediatrician, not through a newsroom.
Saturday’s close sits alongside other IMS academic events on the campus calendar. For now, the takeaway for city readers is straightforward: IMS-BHU has just put a two-day national ISAA skills workshop on the books, and its leadership is publicly backing early, multidisciplinary autism care.
