Supporting children & young people with potentially acute health conditions – advice for practitioners

The May meetings of the three MSCB locality Fora reviewed a case study regarding supporting young people with potentially acute health conditions. This generated discussions around the contribution of multi-agency partners in supporting children, young people, parents and carers to safeguard children with acute and chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes and eczema.

The Fora discussions identified that families do not always understand the seriousness of their child’s medical condition, and the potential worst case scenario outcome of death, if they do not act appropriately. Moreover multi-agency workers, including social workers, do not always understand the seriousness of some medical conditions

Key learning from the Fora discussions included:

1. The importance of full multi-agency information sharing regarding the safeguarding concerns and clarity about the impact on the child’s health and medical needs.
2. Referrals to request social work support for children with medical conditions need to capture the voice of the child and the impact on the child from their medical condition in addtion to safeguarding concerns; it should be clear what the professional making the referral wants to happen.
3. Referrals from health services for social work support need to be of a good quality and clearly demonstrate what the risks are – and how serious the concerns are. For example if a parent smokes what is the risk to a child with brittle asthma and what does that child need to stay safe (ie. a smoke free environment).
4. The importance of multi-agency partners working with health colleagues, including paediatricians from the district general and the specialist hospital, specialists nurses, therapists and universal health practitioners (health visitor, school nurse and GP) to request clarification on how the safeguarding and health issues impact on the child’s wellbeing. To inform the threshold or level of need it is essential to have a clear understanding of the child’s medical needs and the impact of the safeguarding concerns on the child’s wellbeing given the specific medical concerns. It is essential that there are conversations with the child’s lead health professional to clarify the child’s health needs. The child’s lead health professional will depend on the nature and the severity of the child’s health/ medical needs.
5. The key worker for a child with a multi-agency plan should have a simple map of the range of health staff, contact numbers and email addresses so that all health staff are invited to child in need and child protection conferences/core groups.
6. Young people should be supported to engage in managing their own condition; Manchester Targeted Youth Support Service should be considered in the support package.
7. Agencies such as housing have a clear role in discussions about the home environment and the multi-agency group need to be explicit as to how this may impact on a child’s health needs.

We will build these findings into our resource hub and training to ensure the findings are shared as widely as possible across the Manchester workforce.