Child mortality
Academics at Warwick have played an important role in development of national guidelines for reviewing children’s deaths.
Background
Every year over 5,000 children and young people in the UK die. It is estimated that 20-25% of these deaths could be prevented.
Child mortality rates are lower in other countries. For example, a recent analysis of WHO data concluded that if the UK health system performed as well as that of Sweden, as many as 1,500 children’s lives could be saved each year. It is clear that the UK faces a big challenge in this area.
What are we doing?
Investigation and support for families affected by cot death
In November 2016, new national guidelines on responding to unexpected death in childhood were published, drawn extensively on the work of Dr Joanna Garstang and Dr Peter Sidebotham. This work focused on understanding parents’ perspectives following an unexpected child death, and sharing best practice in joint agency responses to unexpected child deaths.
The guidelines, 'Sudden unexpected death in infancy and childhood', were published by The Royal College of Pathologists and The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Find out more.
Dr Sidebotham is currently contributing to the development of national guidelines on child death review under NHS England and revisions to the DfE national interagency guidelines, Working together to safeguard children. These new national guidelines will be released early in 2018.
The work at Warwick Medical School on unexpected child death has provided the basis for an ongoing national interagency training programme on responding to unexpected child deaths.
Analysis of national Serious Case Reviews into deaths/serious injury from abuse and neglect
Dr Peter Sidebotham led a recent government-commissioned review of Serious Case Reviews into deaths/ serious injury from abuse and neglect. This review has led to substantial changes to the arrangements for safeguarding children and child death reviews. The full report and a number of practitioner briefings have been madey available online through Research Into Practice. In the first six months, there were a total of 4,963 visits to the website, with 1,367 downloads of the full report and 814 downloads of the practitioner briefings