Call to boost GP safeguarding and child support role

The report The GP’s role in responding to child maltreatment says family doctors are ideally placed to identify the early warning signs of child neglect and emotional abuse because they are often the first point of contact for parents and their children.

As well as alerting children’s professionals to safeguarding concerns, GPs should also be involved in co-ordinating the early intervention response to struggling families through monitoring child welfare, ensuring support services are put in place and addressing parental issues such as substance misuse or mental health problems.

However, the report from the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), the NSPCC and researchers from UCL and the University of Surrey says GP practices are under too much pressure to enable doctors to spend long enough with patients to properly understand their problems.

For this to happen, it says the government needs to rethink the role of the GP to create an early intervention-focused public health system that puts the doctor-child/parent relationship at its core in an effort to reduce child maltreatment.

Dr Maureen Baker, chair of the RCGP, said: “By recognising early signs of strain in children and their families, which may involve physical or emotional symptoms, GPs can be of real help and in some cases help prevent situations or conditions getting worse.

“General practice itself is in a state of crisis, with GPs heaving under the pressures of ballooning workloads and plummeting funding. More than 90 per cent of all NHS patient contacts are dealt with in general practice for only 8.39 per cent of the overall budget – an all time low.
 
“We are calling on the four governments of the UK to ensure that general practice receives 11 per cent of the NHS budget by 2017. This would allow us to recruit more GPs and offer more services and appointments for patients of all ages.”

Baker added that the RCGP is pushing for GP training to be extended from three to four years to incorporate greater focus on child health and mental health – currently, only half of GP trainees undertake a specialist paediatric work placement.