The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is mandated by its mission statement to support improving child health in the UK and around the world. Our current College strategy includes continuing high-quality programme delivery, with increasing awareness of our high-impact humanitarian activities, carried out primarily in low-income as well as fragile/conflict-affected settings.
Updated March 2025
RCPCH affirms that:
- The College maintains an unqualified commitment to human rights including child rights as set out in the current architecture of international humanitarian and human rights legislation, treaty agreements, conventions and norms. These include the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the Geneva Conventions. Further context is set out in the College’s position statement on international conflict.
- The College maintains a close and continuous review of its geographical areas of interest outside the UK, with a view to understanding child health needs in the context of their particular social, political and economic environments and institutional settings.
- The College’s response to an international conflict or a natural disaster is reviewed and approved through the College’s relevant governance bodies from their respective responsibilities including its Board and Council, Executive Committee and Senior Leadership Team. This considers principles such as the College’s mandate and institutional remit, impact or opportunity for the College to respond meaningfully, and whether the College has available resource to support a response. If the College is responding to a particular crisis, it does not comment on named individuals but more broadly on the welfare of children and young people and healthcare workers.
- The College reserves the right to refuse to undertake work in countries or areas which present a security threat to members, staff or associates, and in countries or areas in which provision of support to child health entails unacceptable interaction with regimes with a verifiable international record of grave humanitarian or serious human rights abuses. The College also reserves the right to engage and/or operate in fragile states on the basis of their prevalent levels of poverty and/or poor child health, where provision of support to paediatric education and health care capacity building can be achieved without undue association with or direct support to reputationally problematic regimes.