Background
In 2020, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the Child Protection Special Interest Group (CPSIG) published the Good practice service delivery standards for the management of children referred for child protection medical assessments (PDF).
These standards were created following discussions between Named and Designated doctors for safeguarding children, that highlighted variation in the ways in which children, families and professionals experience the process of a medical assessment when there are child protection concerns related to physical abuse and neglect.
The standards set a benchmark for service delivery, and consider the range of processes and procedures that make up the often complex situation of a medical assessment in the context of child protection concerns.
The RCPCH is now conducting a nationwide audit of these standards.
Audit aims
The audit aims to:
- understand the extent to which the standards are being implemented across the UK
- explore models of service delivery
- understand how well current service delivery infrastructure supports teams to meet the standards
- encourage best practice in service delivery where planned child protection medical assessments are being conducted.
The audit will allow identification of areas where improvement in service delivery may be needed, providing the crucial data necessary to support departments which may need additional resource, funding and quality improvement activity at local and national level.
Participation
We would like all services providing child protection medical assessments within working hours (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm) to participate in this audit.
Register your service to participate
During registration, each service will be able to name a lead - typically a Named or Designated Doctor for safeguarding. This person will have responsibility for and ownership of their service's audit data entry, and will be a primary point of contact for service-related audit correspondence.
Participation is not mandatory but is highly encouraged to maximise the utility of the data and benefits of the audit. We have nearly 100 services signed up to date.
Data collection
Our online data collection platform is being hosted on the RCPCH Data Portal.
We have successfully conducted a short pilot of the audit on the Portal, and plan to launch the official audit in mid-late March 2023. We will communicate specific dates and timelines with registered services and update this page with further data collection information in due course.
Download our pilot audit report below to discover our early findings and learn more about the eventual data we will be collecting.
Contact us
If you have any questions about the audit, please email Karina Green, Data Manager at CPaudit@rcpch.ac.uk