Children’s missed health care appointments v0.1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Professional and organisational responses to children’s missed health care appointments: a child protection concern? Pilot work.
IRAS ID
131128
Contact name
Jane V Appleton
Contact email
Research summary
Children have a fundamental right to access the health care that they need in order to achieve maximum health and development in childhood and beyond. Parents have the primary responsibility to ensure their child’s health needs are met and this includes ensuring they access health care appointments. A failure to ensure access to health care is linked to poor outcomes and recognised as a child protection matter within statutory definitions of neglect. Importantly, failure to attend appointments is a known feature in the history of children who have suffered serious child abuse and/or neglect. For this reason children’s health policy has been to promote the importance of following up children who fail to attend for health care. We are concerned that this may not be happening in practice and that health care organisations may respond to children’s missed appointments as they would to a competent adult i.e. to record a ’Did not Attend’ (DNA) in the case notes, send a further appointment and, if that too is missed, discharge from follow-up, with (usually) a letter to the General Practitioner.
Promoting the notion of ’Was not Brought’ (WNB) rather than DNA in relation to children’s missed health care appointments has gained interest from health and social care colleagues and the NSPCC, who are providing funding for a scoping exercise. This project has two phases, first to undertake a web-based scoping review of NHS provider organisations’ compliance (Care Quality Commission, 2009) with policies for managing missed appointments and secondly to undertake a Case Study at one NHS hospital. This second phase will utilise multiple sources and techniques (e.g. documentary analysis, brief face to face/telephone interviews with key stakeholders, examination of the ’systems’ in place, case tracking) to ascertain ’what is going on here’ and to seek solutions to improve practice.
REFERENCE
Care Quality Commission (2009) Safeguarding Children: a review of arrangements in the NHS for safeguarding children. London: CQC.REC name
North East - Tyne & Wear South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/NE/0315
Date of REC Opinion
16 Oct 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion