Child Health

NCEPOD has been commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) to undertake the Child Health Clinical Outcome Review Programme on behalf of NHS England, DHSSPS Northern Ireland, the Health Department of the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

The Child Health programme is one of four Clinical Outcome Review Programmes which are designed to help assess the quality of healthcare, and stimulate improvement in safety and effectiveness by systematically enabling clinicians, managers and policy makers to learn from adverse events and other relevant data. The other programmes are;

• The Medical & Surgical Programme – also run by NCEPOD
• The Mental Health Programme
• The Maternal Newborn and Infant Programme

This work programme will build on and extend the work of previous child health confidential enquiries and clinical outcome review programmes. The final child health enquiry report ‘Why Children Die’ was published by CMACE in 2008. This programme collected and analysed a core set of mortality data on children from 1- 18 years.

The Child Health Clinical Outcome Review Programme was recommissioned in 2010 and in 2011 the contract was awarded to The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. They subsequently published two reports in 2013 under their Child Health Review (CHR-UK) project;

1. Overview of child deaths in the four UK countries; A retrospective epidemiological review of all-cause mortality
2. Coordinating Epilepsy Care; a UK wide review of healthcare in cases of mortality and prolonged seizures in children and young people with epilepsies.

Three priority areas for the new Child Health Clinical Outcome Review Programme have been identified as:

• The interface between different settings on children and young people’s care pathways, particularly between primary and secondary care and health and social care.
• Quality of care provision.
• Transition between children and adult services.

Two topic areas have been identified:

• Children with chronic neurodisability.
• Young People’s Mental Health.

Two methods will be applied:

• Qualitative assessment of care using semi-structured questionnaires and multi-disciplinary peer review – to be led by NCEPOD.
• Linkage of existing national datasets to provide a wider picture of the patterns in patient care – to be led by Cardiff University and Swansea University.

The primary aims are:

• To drive improvement in health outcomes and reduce inequalities for children and young people across the two topic areas.
• To highlight variation in the provision and quality of healthcare.
• To highlight gaps in the provision of integrated care for children, young people and their families and provide recommendations on how these can be addressed.
• To put children, young people and their families at the centre of the development and delivery of the work programme.
• To stimulate quality improvement in the delivery of care to children and young people at both a local and national level.
• To influence practice change at individual clinician/allied health professional level.
• To highlight issues requiring policy change at a national level and provide recommendations.
• To support commissioning and service redesign by helping commissioners understand their opportunities to improve outcomes for patients and increase value.