The amendment was strongly supported across the children’s health, care and safeguarding sector and by parliamentarians, and we welcomed this important focus on improving information sharing which is so fundamental to improving care and life outcomes for children. The Health and Care Act introduced significant improvements to information sharing across health and adult social care, and our collective hope was that this report would move us towards parity for children.
However, despite considerable engagement from key children’s stakeholders including RCPCH over the last 12 months, the report, which has been published today, has taken a different direction than what was indicated in the legislation. The report has moved from considering improvements to information sharing for health, care and safeguarding to looking at information sharing through a safeguarding lens and does not commit to a consistent child identifier for every child, as we had hoped.
In response to the report, RCPCH President Dr Camilla Kingdon said:
While the report explores challenges and solutions to information sharing, particularly for safeguarding, we feel it fails to introduce significant improvements to information sharing for the wider health and care system. We agree with other stakeholders that even in the context of safeguarding, the report does not go far enough in outlining new solutions to tackle barriers to information sharing. We cannot help but feel that this is a missed opportunity for genuine change.
We were also disappointed to see no concrete action towards implementing the NHS number as a consistent child identifier, which has been long been called for by leading organisations across children’s health, care, education and safeguarding and by paediatricians, and the use of which has been mandated for adults since 2015. We strongly believe that implementing a consistent child identifier has the potential to improve data linkage, support joined-up care, identify harm at an earlier stage, and ultimately to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for children, particularly those who are most vulnerable and known to multiple services.
However, we do welcome the focus on improving information sharing overall and hope this report will be the first step towards action and implementation. We look forward to continuing to engage with DHSC and DfE officials constructively to achieve much needed change in this area which will benefit children and young people and the workforce which supports them.
We also welcome the , of which RCPCH are a member.