How is it treated.?..

Ideally the children and young people will have a strong team of health professionals to provide a co-ordinated and complete treatment and care package. In the real world it is doctors who see these children. They make the diagnosis and supervise both the medical and more holistic treatments for children with JIA.

However, to offer the best standard of care for children with JIA, there is a real need for a variety of professionals to make up a team looking after these children. Most importantly there is a real need for a specialist nurse with the knowledge and experience to give the children the care they need. There is also a desperate need for physiotherapists specialising in JIA to not only deal with the inflammation in the joints but to deal with the consequences of this in order to allow the child to lead as fulfilling a life as possible.

There are newer treatments becoming available for JIA and the improvement in the treatment of children with JIA may be put down primarily to the development of new and better drugs. However, in order to use these drugs and develop new and better drugs in the future, specialist centres must push forward the boundaries in improving the care of these children by doing research. This involves a huge amount of paperwork to keep detailed records over many years that must be available for public scrutiny. Currently this paperwork is done by specialists taking up many hours of their valuable time, which could better be used to see more young people. This is holding back the use of new treatments.