Editorial: Child protection inadequacies are still rife

Three years after the publication of the Children's Act, it uncovers a disturbing lack of partnership working between health and social care. Precisely the same mistakes that allowed Victoria Climbie to slip through the net are still being made.

The report finds social work support to be something of a lottery for children admitted to hospitals outside their home authority, as Climbie repeatedly was. Most local authorities are yet to formalise service expectations in such cases. It also finds that access to child protection registers by hospital staff is patchy, particularly for children from authorities outside the hospital's area. And where children are kept in hospital for more than three months, few hospitals or local authorities have developed protocols for assessing their needs, despite a recommendation for hospital trusts to do so in the most recent joint chief inspector's report.

But at the heart of the myriad failings exposed by the study is a lack of communication between social work and healthcare. In the half or so of hospitals studied that have on-site social workers, communication was generally found to be easier, with more informal discussion between people familiar with each other. Yet across the board, communication is hindered by differences in language, lines of accountability and working cultures and practices. What communication exists is often in response to a crisis.

To properly safeguard children, communication must amount to more than just information sharing. As the report states, judgements about child protection are negotiated between different professional groups rather than diagnosed, hence its call for local safeguarding children's boards to formulate a clear communication strategy at strategic and operational level.

In his report into the death of Victoria Climbie, Lord Laming described a situation of "inadequate and ambitious recordings of information and actions, deferred actions, assumptions and expectations that things 'would happen' or be done by 'someone' or others 'at a later stage'." Having funded this study, the Department of Health must probe the failings and put in place urgently needed measures to avoid Laming's words coming back to haunt all those with an interest in child protection.